Martin Dressler: The Tale Of An American Dreamer (1997) - Plot & Excerpts
The first time I picked this up I devoured it, like the meal you begin eating simply because it is placed before you, but which tastes so good you cannot stop until you have finished it. When I put the book down I had to spend several minutes trying to figure out where I was. As it turns out, I happened to be in a hotel room in Berlin, listening to the light-rail rattle by outside. I felt tired and confused and I wasn't sure what to do next. Other reviewers have tried to make the case that this book is bad – or, not as good as it "could be," – because it meanders, because it is too emotional or because it is too matter-of-fact, or because it has too light a touch, or it's too focused on the hotels or too focused on relationships with women, grounded in too much materialism or skewed too heavily towards the fantastical, etc... All of these comments seem to me to miss the point. They approach the point, and all form a circle around it, but cannot quite find the center. Steven Millhauser's primary concern is not what his character's dream is and is not. For the record, Martin Dressler's dream is not the money which he makes easily, it is not the adventuresome society of burgeoning laissez-faire capitalism he is born into, and it is not love or sex, though all these forces are present and serve to complicate matters. Believe it or not, his dream is not even a perfect hotel.All dreamers, all artists, all creators wish simply to build a world: a microcosm which actively encompasses and contains their singular vision of the macrocosm in which they find themselves. Thus, like any great novel or painting or piece of music, the Grand Cosmo – Dressler's last attempt at creation - seeks to hold inside of it an entire city, perhaps an entire world by extension. However, as I said, it is not the Grand Cosmo which is important to Millhauser, but rather what the Grand Cosmo does to its creator. Millhauser's goal is to reproduce what it feels like to have a dream, an overwhelming dream, and to have one's dreams slip into one's daily life and vice versa. Millhauser wants us to see through the eyes of a dreamer. Therein lies the frustration for the average reader: In the form of fascinating subplots, themes, and characters, they see Millhauser stumble seemingly at random upon perfect jewels. He picks them up, lets us stare for a moment through their beauty, and then returns them to the ground and moves on. We want him to collect them, to follow the trail to its conclusion, but he will not. He skims the surface of many topics our imagination might like him to dive into, but again and again he refuses. That is because to a dreamer, when contrasted with a dream, these things are ultimately trivial and unimportant. Millhauser is showing us that in the mind of the dreamer and in the fantasy world Dressler has created for himself, the concerns of the material world fade to white noise. A previous reviewer calls Martin Dressler "out of touch," and though I find the term somewhat pejorative I think it is accurate. But let us not confuse our characters with our authors. Millhauser is much too talented to simply abandon or gloss over that which could have made his story better. No, each detail presented to us by and through the macrocosm (otherwise known as the "real world") is merely a study in contrast, a grey version of the fully-colored thing as it exists in Dressler's fantasies, a landmark showing him and us the way to our eventual goal, which is the Ideal. Yes, Martin Dressler is out of touch with the world around him; but he is very much in touch with the world of dreams, and this comes through the text, beautiful and subtly.
This one caught me by surprise . . . Though it's not an action-packed page-turner, I was completely absorbed by this book. Just read the author's description of New York City circa 1894:. . . Martin lead the Vernon women down clattering station stairways to look at details: strips of sun and shadow rippling across a cabhorse's back under a curving El track, old steel rails glinting in the cobblestones. He bought them bags of hot peanuts from a peanut wagon with a steam whistle. He showed them Mott Street pushcarts heaped with goats' cheese and green olives and sweet fennel, took them along East River docks bowspirits and jib booms reached halfway across the street. He walked them through an open market down by Pier 19, where horses in blankets stood hitched to wagons loaded with baskets of cabbages and turnips. 'Look at that!' he cried, pointing to an old-clothes seller wearing a swaying stack of twelve hats, a gigantic pair of wooden scissors over a cutter's shop. Down a narrow sidestreet in a bright crack between warehouses, an East River scow filled with cobblestones slipped by.What a beautiful piece of writing; it's almost magical in the way it conjures up not only images, but sounds and smells as well.Here is the story of almost three decades in the life of Martin Dressler, a young go-getter who starts with nothing and works hard to build a fortune. (The kind of man Donald Trump likes to think he is . . .) From humble beginnings in his father's cigar shop, Martin comes to own a luncheonette which he manages to turn into a chain of successful eateries. This leads to hotels, ever larger, ever grander and more fanciful.At first, the character of Martin seemed too good, too sickeningly perfect, but he is soon revealed as having a fondness for visiting whores, though technically, this is patronizing a "business," so it may have been acceptable. He then makes the rookie mistake of marrying a lovely, though oddly listless woman instead of her less attractive sister who is so obviously his soulmate. Another flaw is that he seems to never be satisfied - everything must be newer, bigger and better. When it comes to the business world, I suppose dissatisfaction can be a driving factor, but it leads to a rather unhappy life for Martin.The first three quarters of the book are utterly, utterly charming. Then things start to get a bit weird with the sisters. The hotels grow more fantastical and the whole book becomes divorced from reality, though it is here that Millhauser's creation realizes the ephemeral nature of his own creations:That was the way of things in New York: they were there one day and gone the next. Even as his new building rose story by story it was already vanishing, the trajectory of the wrecker's ball had been set in motion as the blade of the first bulldozer bit into the earth. And as Martin turned the corner he seemed to hear, in the warm air, a sound of crumbling masonry, he seemed to see, in the summer light, a faint dust of old buildings sitting down.All in all, the book remains a love letter to old New York and a paean to the entrepreneurial spirit.
What do You think about Martin Dressler: The Tale Of An American Dreamer (1997)?
I loved the early descriptions of New York. The writing style was lovely and prosey and I felt it suited the descriptions and the feelings of a growing economy, changing times, entrepreneurial spirit, etc. I was quite pleased with the first half of the book. I hated the passages with the wife, and as they increased my irritation with the main character also grew. Eventually I found him irritating as hell. Then we sort of veered into magic realism, which is not my strong point. While his dreams were realistic, I was rooting for him, but as he got more impractical and absurd, I didn't stop rooting exactly: I stopped caring at all. The end of the book was lists and lists and lists that didn't so much build a tension as they did read like the author himself was pretty eager to get to the end, but he promised himself 300 pages. I was relieved when it was over.
—Tuckova
This story is about the quintessential concept that defines American culture: the American dream. Martin Dressler begins the book as a clerk in a cigar store in New York at the dawn of the 20th century. As he watches the city spring up around him, he's filled with ideas of his own on improving the landscape. He starts with a restaurant, which becomes a chain, then moves to hotels. Along the way, he picks up several consumer concepts that are in their infancy, like subliminal advertising campaigns and department stores. While each new project enjoys great success, Martin is filled with the sensation that he wants to make more. His final creation, a sprawling edifice called The Cosmos that resembles Disney World and the Mall of America, strives so hard to be everything that it ends up being nothing. This novel is particularly resonant today as we experience the effects our insatiable appetite for wealth and property.
—Meri
Gosh, what an odd book. It's really like a long exercise in creating a metaphor for the overexuberant capitalism of the turn of last century, and its ultimate vacuity. *some vague spoilers*The first half of the book I really enjoyed, but once the Vernon sisters entered I felt things went downhill. (Does this mean I have stomach only for rise, and not fall? I don't know). And I had existential panic during some of the longer passages about the thematic follies in his hotels, pages of research-description that I just had to skim over (and which reminded me perversely of Patrick Bateman going on about mineral water o crappy pop music, and not at all of shivery mystical list of Borges' Aleph). I did not need to know quite so much about the taste in novelties of that era; or more to the point, I didn't get so much from having lists of it made for me. Not sure what to take from it, ultimately; a sense of taken-abackness?It was a really strange book. I can't decide between two and three stars.
—Emma
