Saturday, September 8, 2012

Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer - Steven Millhauser

Date Started: 9/4/12
Date Finished: 9/8/12

This book came highly recommended and the cover touts "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize"(!). It seemed a little out of my typical reading fare, so I decided why not. And I have to say, I liked it a lot. Didn't love the ending, but we'll get there.


This story is about Martin Dressler, as the title would imply. He is the son of a cigar maker, in the late 1800s in New York. We meet Martin in 1881, at the age of nine years old, and we quickly learn how different he is. Different in that he works hard, strives to make his way in the world. He works multiple jobs at the same time and has an ethic that would be almost unheard of today. One of his jobs is as bellhop at at hotel - the Vanderlyn - where through more hard work, he eventually makes his way up to manager's assistant. But you know that for Martin, this is never going to be enough, and he opens a cafeteria on the side, where he starts making a ton of money. He develops the cafeteria into a chain of cafeterias before eventually selling out so that he can buy the Vanderlyn. From the Vanderlyn, he opens The Dressler, then the New Dressler, and finally the Grand Cosmo. The hotels progress from your standard fare (the Vanderlyn) to adding more and more of the bizarre, until you get to the Grand Cosmo, a world unto itself. The descriptions of the Grand Cosmo are so detailed you can see this world, but you still can't full imagine it. To put these descriptions into a hotel just doesn't fit, and ultimately, the hotel fails.

In the meantime, while all of this is going on, Martin meets and befriends a mother and her two daughters, Emmeline and Caroline. Emmeline is his true match in every way and his relationship with her is one of the bright spots in the book, until it isn't. Caroline is the pretty, delicate sister, so of course he marries her, much to his detriment. I don't know what Caroline's problem is - maybe depression? - but she has no interest in Martin, their marriage bed, or anything else. Martin doesn't cheat with Emmeline, though he clearly has more of a relationship with her then he ever will with his wife, and you almost wish he would. But he isn't attracted to her, unfortunately. Their bizarre, intertwined relationships culminate with Caroline trying to switch herself with Emmeline, and then firing a gun in the room with Emmeline and Martin present. From then on, Martin's relationship with Emmeline dissolves and he feels that absence keenly. He doesn't much care that Caroline is gone to him - he never really had her after all.

So how does all of this end? Martin's dreams have failed, he has essentially lost everything and everyone and we generally feel pretty bad for him, while seeing the failures that brought him to this point quite clearly. To be honest, I thought he was going to commit suicide. I really, really did. I'm glad he didn't. This sentence, in the last paragraph of the books, seems to sum Martin up:

"For when you woke from a long dream, into the new morning, then try as you might you couldn't not hear, beyond your door, the sounds of the new day, the drawer opening in your father's bureau, the bang of a pot, you couldn't not see, through your trembling lashes, the stripe of light on the bedroom wall."

And with that you know that somehow, Martin will be ok. He'll probably leave everything behind and reinvent himself somewhere and be a success to boot, wiser for his journey.

Final note: the descriptions of New York at this time were fantastic; for someone who lives here now, imagining the New York of the late 1800s is almost impossible and this book brought it to life. Even if the story were bad or the writing atrocious (which it isn't), this book would be worth reading for anyone in New York City.  

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