William Hjortsberg from
The New York Times praised the novel, saying it :displays an enviable amount of craft, the harsh discipline that carves through the scar‐tissue of personality painfully developed during a process known as 'growing‐up.' ...
Edwin Mullhouse evokes the world of children with delicacy and precision... Steven Millhauser has written a rare and carefully evoked novel. He tells us quite a bit about the nature of children and supplies us with a few useful clues about art in the process. Hjortsberg concluded that :If the story is sometimes slow, it is never uninteresting, and the high points soar with the breath‐held clarity of true fiction. You won't find the plot in this review; only your bookseller can supply that. The title about sums it up for the pill‐takers.
Zachary Leader in the
London Review of Books was also positive, although his review was written some seven years after the book's American publication: :Stephen Millhauser, for all his novel's faults, is dazzlingly gifted, not just in the richly sensual precision and wit of his writing (the 'hot blue bulb' of the silver camera flash Edwin's father brings him, 'so that he can press his fingernails into the soft warm bumps of glass'), or his encyclopedic knowledge of the minutiae of American childhood ('paper bags and scraps of waxpaper tumbling across the deserted playground'), but in the gathering menace with which Jeffrey’s Humbert-like obsessiveness is revealed, and the (on the whole) becoming tentativeness with which its relation to the hoary chestnuts 'Art v. Life' and 'Intellect v. Instinct' is suggested. ==References==