“There once lived a man named Martin Dressler, a shopkeeper’s son, who rose from modest beginnings to a height of dreamlike good fortune … 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, The Dreamer
Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer was published in 1996 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1997. If ever there was an antithesis to the work of Ayn Rand, this is it.
Author Steven Millhauser provides an unnerving critique of American exceptionalism through the title character’s life and perspective.
Set in late nineteenth century New York City, a young boy (Martin) starts his career in business by working for his father in a cigar shop.
But this is no ordinary boy. This boy personifies the entrepreneurial spirit of the time, a time of expansion and optimism, when the skyline was changing faster than fashion’s hemlines.
Social Ascent
His social and economic ascent begins while he is assisting his father, coming up with new ways to market cigars. He quickly moves up to being a bellboy in a good hotel, to eventually owning and building his own hotels.
The problem is Martin gets everything he wants so quickly that he wants more, and in wanting more, and more, and more, and getting it – whether his object of desire is his eventual wife, Caroline Vernon, a tryst with a low class chambermaid, or the best table at a prestigious restaurant – he essentially goes mad.
First Hotel
When he builds his first hotel it is a tremendous success. But he must always outdo and reinvent himself, and when he attempts to create a mammoth hotel named the Cosmo, an artificial environment replete with deserts, exotic animals, and a shopping mall, he replaces, instead of augments, reality.
And (spoiler alert!) the whole of his creation crashes down before him.
Rags To Riches
What makes the story worth reading is the identification readers feel while rooting for Martin. Everyone can sympathize with wanting to grow beyond one’s station in life, at least secretly, if not overtly.
Martin’s successes “feel” justified by his (our) rage against poverty and meritocracy, so that by about two-thirds into the novel, one wishes nothing but the best for Dressler. One feels less ambiguous because Martin is a complex and contradictory person; in other words, real.
His fears are always under the surface. He struggles with cognitive dissonance between the family he was born into, versus the high society he works to join. His anxiety becomes our anxiety. The reader places his bets on Martin Dressler despite having been warned in the very beginning.
To read the rest of this review, please visit The Hollywood Sentinel in the link below, and click on the story via the table of contents tab to the left of the page.
