Steven Millhauser and Edwin Mullhouse

A friend has pushed this on me for years, but I never got into it.
Mullhouse's meisterwerk was called Crayons, no?

It was called Comics -- and the payoff, when you finally learn its content, is pretty tremendous. Millhauser has this kind of prose that seems to put everything in a glass case, presented as some sort of curio or Cornell box, and I think it works terrifically in this one. Its big highlights, in fact, turn out to be lists: a list of things Edwin taught his little sister, a section describing the boys’ first year of school as a whir of holiday arts-and-crafts projects, a series of poems Edwin writes for a girl in his class. The fact that it’s all set down by a twelve-year-old who writes like Nabokov helps.

presented as some sort of curio or Cornell box
Right, like the closet full of games in The Royal Tenenbaums.

(Ha: Millhauser has a story called "A Game of Clue," in which some people, you know, play Club; someone told me the other day that he really loved that story, which surprised me, as I thought it was just okay; then I got paranoid that there was some secret formalist thing going on with the Clue game, and that I was so Clue-illiterate that I'd missed it.)

Edwin Mullhouse is a superb novel.

It really is! But I haven't yet gotten back to the Clue game.