Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer [Paperback]

Steven Millhauser (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 25, 1997

Young Martin Dressler begins his career as an industrious helper in his father's cigar store.  In the course of his restless young manhood, he makes a swift and eventful rise to the top, accompanied  by two sisters--one a dreamlike shadow, the other a worldly business partner. As the eponymous Martin's vision becomes bolder and bolder he walks a haunted line between fantasy and reality, madness and ambition, art and industry, a  sense of doom builds piece-by-hypnotic piece until this mesmerizing journey into the heart of an American dreamer reaches its bitter-sweet conclusion.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Martin Dressler is a turn-of-the-century New York City entrepreneur who begins in his father's cigar store but dreams of a bigger empire. That dream shapes into a series of large hotels. At first, Dressler's seems the archetypal American success story, but he does not quite grasp the future. The Manhattan of fabled skyline is about to take shape just over the horizon, but Dressler cannot see it. So the story becomes another kind of fable, as Dressler contemplates having "dreamed the wrong dream." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Literature's romance with the building-as-metaphor earns new energy through Millhauser's latest novel (after Little Kingdoms, 1993), which quietly chronicles the life of an entrepreneur whose career peaks when he builds a fabulous hotel in turn-of-the-century Manhattan. Beginning with his first jobs-in his father's cigar shop and as a bellhop-young Martin's rise is fueled by a happy blend of pragmatism and imagination. Both inform the design of the cafes and hotels he builds as an adult, though the latter seems to gain sway in the construction of his magnum opus, the Grand Cosmo. Within the rusticated walls of that grand hotel, one floor's elevators open onto "a densely wooded countryside" dotted with cottages; another floor simulates a rugged mountainside, featuring "caves" furnished with beds, plumbing and "refrigerated air." For recreation, guests can wander in the artificial moonlight of the Pleasure Park or visit the Temple of Poesy, where young women in Green tunics will recite poetry, 24 hours a day. Such amenities speak of Dressler's view of the hotel as "a world within the world, rivaling the world." In deliberate contrast stands Millhauser's cooler evocation of his protagonist's private life. The magnate's genial sister-in-law works for him, while the troubles of his neurasthenic wife-"his sister's sister, his tense, languous, floating, ungraspable bride"-reflect his increasingly manic, untethered imaginings. Millhauser's characteristic fascination with the material artifacts of the vanished past-and the startling deftness with which he can describe the street, the carnival, the hotel that never existed-marks him as a cultural historian as well as an idiosyncratic fabulist. Taking its place alongside other fine tales of architectural symbology, from Poe to Borges to Ayn Rand, this enticing novel becomes at once the tale of a life, a marriage and a creative imagination in crisis.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 293 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; First Edition edition (March 25, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679781277
• ISBN-13: 978-0679781271
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (134 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #250,020 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars top notch mythmaking May 2, 2001

By Orrin C. Judd VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

There once lived a man named Martin Dressler, a shopkeeper's son, who rose from modest beginnings to a height of dreamlike good fortune. This was toward the end of the nineteenth century, when on any streetcorner in America you might see some ordinary-looking citizen who was destined to invent a new kind of bottlecap or tin can, start a chain of five-cent stores, sell a faster and better elevator, or open a fabulous new department store with big display windows made possible by an improved process for manufacturing sheets of glass. Although Martin Dressler was a shopkeeper's son, he too dreamed his dream, and at last he was lucky enough to do what few people even dare to imagine: he satisfied his heart's desire. But this is a perilous privilege, which the gods watch jealously, waiting for the flaw, the little flaw, that brings everything to ruin, in the end. -Martin Dressler

Steve Millhauser, in both the subtitle of this book and the opening lines quoted above, notifies the reader that the story of Martin Dressler is the stuff of myth, and an intensely American myth at that. In the New York City of the 1890s, Martin rises from humble beginnings in his father's cigar store to become the City's greatest hotelier. With each new wildly successful venture, Martin's dreams grow in scope. Until he arrives at his final creation, the Grand Cosmo, with subterranean levels and hidden rooms. It houses impossibilities like trout streams and geysers, boardwalks and bazaars :

[T]he Grand Cosmo was not a tourist attraction or a hotel for transients, but a world within the world, rivaling the world; and whoever entered its walls had no further need of that other world.

But when it starts to fail, Martin wonders if he is at last a victim of hubris :

For surely the Grand Cosmo was an act of disobedience. Or he was being punished for something deeper than crime, for a desire, a forbidden desire, the desire to create the world ?

Indeed, this time Martin has gone too far and not all the genius of his creation, nor the power of his advertisements and promotions can save the Grand Cosmo from failure. But as the story ends and he looks back on his life he is relatively content :

For he had done as he liked, he had gone his own way, built his castle in the air. And if in the end he had dreamed the wrong dream, the dream that others didn't wish to enter, then that was the way of dreams, it was only to be expected, he had no desire to have dreamt otherwise.

Besides the magic tinged prose, something like a cross between E. L Doctorow and Mark Helprin, what gives the book its great power is this essential vision. Of course Martin has dared too much and has left his patrons behind, but there's a strong sense throughout, even as he's failing, that such extravagant dreamers are central to American innovation, even central to human progress. For what may have started out as a comment on the all-consuming nature of capitalism and of the American Dream, ends up partaking of the Fall of Man and dealing with the mad ambitions that drive the species. Martin's dreams may ultimately come a cropper, but how much worse never to have dreamed ? This is an ambitious attempt at epic mythmaking which succeeds brilliantly.

GRADE : A+

28 of 33 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "We are such stuff as dreams are made on." Prospero July 27, 2001

By Bruce Kendall VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Martin Dressler is Prospero, Horatio Alger, Jay Gatsby, William Randolph Hearst, William Paley, Richard Cory, Donald Trump, Icarus, and most prominently, he is everyman and nobody. As noted by the more astute observers on these pages, Millhauser has created a fable here, a myth, a romance about human limitations and possibilities. The readers who attack the book for lack of depth, or characterization, or plot, have missed the mark, most likely because they are not well-grounded in Millhauser's mythic sources, and can't recognize a carefully-construed allegory.

This novel is as textually rich as a novel can be, but one must dig a little deeper, as Martin digs deeper into the earth in each successive structure he creates. It is also a novel of psychology, as Martin also digs deeper and deeper into his subconscious mind as the novel progresses. This is a multi-tiered work, operating on so many levels as to leave one dazzled at the sheer scope of the enterprise. Such works are easily dismissed by the masses, which is why it is surprising that the Pulitzer committee, so often gravitating to the successful and the obvious, definitely got one right in this instance.

The structure of the novel parallels the themes and "plot" of Millhauser's story. In the first few chapters we find ourselves inhabiting a rather mundane, prosaic, grounded reality, as Martin, the son of a cigar-store owner (as was William Paley), is presented as an industrious, intelligent young man who is liked by everyone he encounters. He is, in these early stages, marked more by his efficiency than his imagination. As the novel progresses, we find ourselves venturing further and further from the ordinary and the possible, into the realm of the extraordinary and then the impossible. The move is from terra-firma to terra incognita, from reality as we understand it to the realm of fantasy and magical-realism. It is also as if Martin's mind deteriorates (transmutates?) from sanity to insanity as he descends (or is it ascends?) into his dreamscape.

There is also an element of Greek fatalism at work here, as Martin is led along in his voyage of discovery by powers greater than himself: "...again he had the old dream-sense that friendly powers were leading him along, powers sympathetic to his deepest desires." Whether or not the gods at work here are truly benign is one of the issues that are not thoroughly resolved in the course of the book, just as they never were in Greek tragedy. Those desiring neat resolutions, should in fact, stick to more mundane, uni-dimensional novels.

Martin's relationship with his wife, Caroline, is also the subject of much criticism at this site. Millhauser is enigmatic on this score as well. He makes obvious her position as the sleeping beauty alone in her tower, whom the prince (Martin) cannot awaken. Yet the mythic elements go deeper than that. The Vernon women also connote the three godesses (Hera, Athena and Aphrodite) at the judgement of Paris, with Martin obviously representing Paris. Martin's/Paris' selection of Aphrodite sets in motion the final catastrophe.

Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of Martin's character is his invisibility (though one reviewer did mention Ellison in passing). Martin starts out as substantive and real, but is transformed further and further until at last he, like his dream, "was left behind to fade slowly into the blue-gray mist of dawn..." In the final chapter he is described as feeling "light, transparent," yet he has actually become transparent long before this. Martin is a ghost haunting the various regions of turn-of-the-century New York. His erotic impulses involve approaching women from behind, so that no faces are involved. It may also be noted that Millhauser never really shows us what Martin looks like, except for a passing remark about clean-shaven cheeks or a slightly bushy mustache. This is an obvious choice on the author's part as he is highly descriptive about many other characters.

For those of you who have dismissed this book for its lack of substance or coherence, it may be suggested that you have indeed missed the boat on this one. This is a novel of rich texture and meaning that may require more than a cursory reading if you are to discover its truths and its ultimate "message." Read it again in the context of myth and possibly even as a companion piece to a work such as C.S. Lewis' <Till We Have Faces> to fathom just how deep this novel is. My only slight criticism is that in the final chapters Millhauser descends to spelling out the allegory for those who hadn't gotten it up that point. Great artists leave that up to the reader/spectator. If not for that slight flaw, this novel would have stood in the front ranks of recent storytelling.

21 of 25 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Unfettered ambition - the "secret malady of the ages" February 27, 2000

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Steven Millhauser's "Martin Dressler" may not be worthy of the hype surrounding its Pulitzer Prize winning status but it's gotten more flak than it deserves. As a novel, it's strangely one dimensional and therefore disappointing, dull even. There isn't much of a storyline to speak of - Martin simply takes on successively bigger projects until he finally overeaches himself - and the characters (including Martin) are all bloodless, cardboard-like stick characters, sleepwalking (ironically, like Caroline) through their parts. Sure, the attention paid to periodic detail is meticulous and impressive but unless you're an afficionado of late 20th century artifacts, chances are that you'll find most of it rather tedious. That's not to say Millhauser's scene setting techniques isn't beautifully executed. It is - his descriptive prose is vivid and flawless but...indulgent. There were moments when I thought the plot was about to take off for some place leftfield but sadly, such promises were never fulfilled. Even the one heart stopping episode near the end of the novel wasn't exploited for its full dramatic potential. Martin's relationship with the Vernon women could have been fascinating had it been allowed to fuel the plot, but it remained underwritten and undeveloped. There's also an eerie feeling about the nature and relationship between the two Vernon sisters that was left unexplored. However, the weaknesses we perceive in "Martin Dressler" as a novel quickly dissolve when cast in the fable genre. Fables aren't after all about real life people but about morality and ideas. Stylistically, there are tell tale signs that suggest this treatment. For instance, Millhauser's distant and omniscient perspective of his characters - Martin's self centredness, his casual lusting over the hotel maid Maria, and his weekly visits to the whores is narrated in a tone that's entirely devoid of moral judgement. The perfectly still, never changing and repetitive image of the langourous Caroline "with her hair pulled tightly back" too has a fairy tale like and slightly spooky quality about it. Readers of "Martin Dressler" are advised to approach it as a fable to avoid disappointment. Despite its weaknesses, there were moments in there which I truly enjoyed. My verdict ? Not the masterpiece to write home about. Neither is it the dud it is made out to be.