I must have missed something, because I just did not get this book. I continued reading it mainly because I'm researching the period for a novel, and his descriptions of New York in 1890-1905 were well done. The narrative portions about the city and Dressler's rise were good. The part about his sleeping-through-life wife were totally skippable. They added nothing to this book, in my opinion, though I'm sure the author had something in mind here. I just have no idea what it was. Another criticism was that, as realistic as the details were, the easy rise to success was not believable. It seemed too easy...like a dream. Which may be a clue. Hard to see what purpose this book was supposed to serve. ( )

Odd tale of a NY businessman visionary circa 1890.

The archetypal American Success Story turned on its head. ( )

As in Millhauser’s previous books, this book recreates the origin of something specifically American—this time not the department store, but the chain restaurant and the modern hotel, built atop a labyrinth of luxury stores. If any other writer would have written a novel on this subject, Martin Dressler would have been simply a boring businessman, but Millhauser’s genius is to know that the origin of most things is ambivalent. He is also a first-rate anthropologist of Americana, and knows that this is the only society where pragmatism, action, and a business-like view of life are (or rather, once were) not necessarily the opposite—as in all other societies—but the other face of a dreamer’s vision. Thus, Martin Dressler is the archetype of this paradoxical and specifically American union. For Dressler, building a modern hotel is a project meant to create a world into itself, a magic world that would link together various small, separate elements. In other words, something akin to a novel.

Like in “Paradise Park” and “The Dream of the Consortium” from The Knife Thrower, Dressler’s desire to build ever more spectacular hotels that would enclose the entire world within their walls, becomes a desire to find a total replica or a perfect copy of the real world: a hotel where you could find the pleasures of the countryside or of nature or of high culture without the inconveniences of travel. A pre-Las Vegas. One could even say that Dressler’s project to build a Grand Cosmo, a hotel that would rival the world itself and ultimately make it superfluous is…the Internet. The dream of a magic world ends up becoming a perversion, the perversion of a soul always hungry for something bigger.

Millhauser’s books are not always liked by the “average reader” because for most people it is hard to move back and forth between a realist esthetics and one rooted in symbols, and this is what reading Millhauser requires. His books are apparently realist, but it is a faux realism because they all have a higher, symbolic level, and often are modern fables. But ultimately what makes him a great writer is his incantatory style, the dream-like atmosphere emanating from his prose.

this was a strange little book all around. charged with an understated but tangible fervor for capitalism, architecture, and sex it hinted ineffectually at the themes and thrust of Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead."

it seems young Martin Dressler can do no wrong. everything at which he sets his hand is wildly successful. as such, he seems to have no character or depth. he has standards to which he adheres, but they seem to have no real origin or function.

as he sails through his strange life, Martin mounts new heights of success and attempts increasingly ambitious undertakings along the way. yet all of this seems to happen without any real motive force driving his actions. it is almost as if things vaguely occur to him, he does them, and then they are wildly successful for no apparent reason. it is a singularly uninteresting way to watch events unfold.

near the end of this novel it takes on a strangely esoteric tone which is totally out of step with all that came before it in the book. we foray from a fairly believable 19th century landscape into an improbable past where nothing we have been led to expect seems true any longer.

even the eventual ruin of the main character leaves one feeling ambivalent at best. since triumph came so easily, it is hard to muster much sympathy for his fall. his unswerving devotion to his last venture seems strange and without real purpose, except to see to the end of his unbridled success.

i read this book in the course of one evening and found it almost utterly without merit. had i had something else at hand, i doubt i would have bothered to finish it.