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.

(Reviewed:02-May-01)

Grade: (A+) Orrin C. Judd

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