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Martin Dressler The Tale of an American Dreamer Steven Millhauser Books

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Martin Dressler The Tale of an American Dreamer Steven Millhauser Books

This is a story of a boy with a strong work ethic, above average intelligence, and vision. He grows up giving his best and his best is rewarded by those he impresses. Then he comes to a cross roads with women, two sisters and a maid in particular. He chooses the pretty one, who from the start exhibits a depressed personality. The reader can see she won't make him happy. And sure enough once on that path, his life takes a turn for the worse.

The writer spends a lot of time detailing the impressive hotels Martin envisions and builds. But as he tries to make up for his lack of success in his personal life by over compensating in his business life, he fails at both.

It's sad, but he is not broken. He looks at it like this; he was not broken by failure, he was not broken by fear of failure, so in a way he has succeeded in a way many of us hold ourselves back from. He has tested the full limits of his knowledge, skills and abilities. He has no regrets.

We see where he went wrong. Eventually he sees where he went wrong too, but he argues; how can he see it as the wrong choice, since it is the logical choice, the natural choice to choose beauty over plainness, to choose form over function.

He rolled his dice till they came up snake eyes and he has no regrets. We should be happier for him, but I was not happier - maybe just a little wiser.

Enjoy this book, I did. I recommend it.


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Martin Dressler The Tale of an American Dreamer Steven Millhauser Books Reviews

Good book about NYC at the turn of the century.
good read
I enjoyed reading this. It reminded me of many other “dreamers” of that time, including Selfridge and his department stores.
Martin Dressler is a well-written, compelling story of a young man pursuing the American dream. Imposing today's standard's on him as I read, I alternately wanted to congratulate him for his sharp business acumen and bop him on the head for being such a dunce when it came to decisions about his personal life. What a likable character! An easy, quick read.
The Wikipedia entry for Steven Millhauser observes that his short stories “treat fantasy themes in a manner reminiscent of… Borges…” In Millhauser’s work, “…mechanical cowboys at penny arcades come to life; curious amusement parks, museums, or catacombs beckon with secret passageways and walking automata; dreamers dream and children fly out their windows at nights on magic carpets…”

Certainly, MARTIN DRESSLER, Millhauser’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, shares this fantasy component with his short stories. In fact, this novel culminates—at least stylistically—with its eponymous hero Martin Dressler wandering the Grand Cosmo, a combination hotel, amusement park, museum, and vacation destination that he, a young and visionary real estate developer, opens in 1905 in a dreamlike version of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Here’s a small sample of what Martin has procured for his goggling guests to experience as they wander

“…the many parks and ponds and gardens, including the Pleasure Park with its artificial moonlight checkering the paths, its mechanical nightingales singing in the branches, its melancholy lagoon and ruined summerhouse; the Haunted Grotto, in which ghosts floated out from behind shadowy stalactites and fluttered toward visitors in a darkness illuminated by lanternlight; the Moorish Bazaar, composed of winding dusty lanes, sales clerks dressed as Arabs and trained in the art of bargaining, and a maze of stalls that sold everything from copper basins to live chickens; the many reconstructions of Hidden New York, including Thieves’ Alley in Mulberry Bend, an opium den, a foggy street of river dives…”

Such fantasy, maybe ten percent of this novel, is undeniably well done, albeit not to everyone’s taste. Meanwhile, the remaining ninety percent of MD shows a young Martin—the book examines his life from roughly his ninth to his 33rd birthday—evolving in business and as a man. These are the dominating components of this book and read as if Millhauser is determined to show that he is more than an author who issues sequences of fantastic images.

In business, Millhauser positions Martin as a natural. He is an able boy working in his father’s cigar store, where he is noticed by a clerk in a nearby hotel and hired as a bellboy, and then rises gradually in the ranks of the hotel, where he revives a moribund cigar store in the lobby and then starts as a restaurateur… and so on until Martin develops the Grand Cosmo, where he unleashes his imagination in stone. “For a building was a dream, a dream made of stone… He had… built his castle in the air…”

So, does this work as a narrative? Nope. In fact, it’s downright irritating since Millhauser presents Martin’s career as a steady progression that finally yields to a single hubristic mistake. In Millhauser’s character Martin, there is no ambition, no strum und drang , and no juice and he rises due to a mechanic-like interest in how things work. In business, such personalities are sometimes called clock-makers (not a compliment) and they do valuable work in the accounting department. They are not, as is Martin, entrepreneurs.

Meanwhile, the second major component of this novel is Martin’s courtship and marriage. Here, Millhauser is careful to establish that Martin is a randy dude; for a time, he visits a brothel regularly; and he consummates a flirtation with a hoi polloi housekeeper. But overwhelmingly, Martin’s sexual issues are entangled with the three Vernon women, who are a flirtatious mom and two sisters—Emmeline, who is masculine and faintly repulsive, and Caroline, who is withdrawn and depressed but for an interlude—one chapter—when she develops what is clearly a lesbian’s crush on another woman. The upshot? Again, Millhauser is irritating, this time because he animates what is supposedly a heterosexual story with deeply ambivalent and repressed sexual inclinations. No wonder Martin’s fantasy world at the Grand Cosmo, which has 12 underground levels, is so over the top.

A chore.
Dreary. Tragic absurd love affair and marriage. Too much description and not enough story. The author is a good writer but the story is shallow.
The story is fairly straightforward young ambitious man makes some mistakes in his relationships because of his tremendous ambition. Where this book really shines is in its descriptive language. Industrial revolution era New York comes alive on every page. I could see this being made into a movie by Wes Anderson or the Cohen Brothers.
This is a story of a boy with a strong work ethic, above average intelligence, and vision. He grows up giving his best and his best is rewarded by those he impresses. Then he comes to a cross roads with women, two sisters and a maid in particular. He chooses the pretty one, who from the start exhibits a depressed personality. The reader can see she won't make him happy. And sure enough once on that path, his life takes a turn for the worse.

The writer spends a lot of time detailing the impressive hotels Martin envisions and builds. But as he tries to make up for his lack of success in his personal life by over compensating in his business life, he fails at both.

It's sad, but he is not broken. He looks at it like this; he was not broken by failure, he was not broken by fear of failure, so in a way he has succeeded in a way many of us hold ourselves back from. He has tested the full limits of his knowledge, skills and abilities. He has no regrets.

We see where he went wrong. Eventually he sees where he went wrong too, but he argues; how can he see it as the wrong choice, since it is the logical choice, the natural choice to choose beauty over plainness, to choose form over function.

He rolled his dice till they came up snake eyes and he has no regrets. We should be happier for him, but I was not happier - maybe just a little wiser.

Enjoy this book, I did. I recommend it.