Martin Dressler
by Steven Millhauser
Award: Pulitzer Winner 1997
Nomination: Dublin Longlist 1998, National Book Finalist 1996
Dates Read: April 15, 2009 & January 10, 2021
Martin is an ambitious young man in 1890’s New York, with a singular gift of vision and the belief that progress is constant and inevitable. He has worked in his father’s tobacco shop since the tender age of 14 and never ceases to contemplate his future and how to increase business at his father’s shop.
In short order, Martin is offered a bell boy position at a nearby hotel at which he quickly advances to clerk and owner of a cigar stand in the lobby. In a couple more years, Martin has the idea and the means to open a combination lunchroom and billiard room in a nearby neighborhood building.
After moving out on his own to the exurbs, Martin meets and begins spending considerable time with the Vernon ladies – Margaret the mother and her two daughters Emmeline and Caroline. While Emmeline is not as pretty as Caroline, she is inquisitive and interested in Martin’s business, eventually becoming a manager at one of his lunchrooms. Caroline, on the other hand, is very pretty but she is reserved and introverted, rarely contributing to the conversation at hand.
Martin, during this time, has also befriended the building’s maid, Marie, and enjoys casual conversation with her every Sunday as she cleans his room. So with many avenues open to him, why on earth he chooses to marry Caroline is beyond me. Does he want a trophy wife? Their marriage night Caroline goes straight to bed while Martin seeks out Marie. None of this is surprising and all seems inevitable.
And so, with a marriage not worth much, Martin throws himself once again into work. He liquidates all his lunchrooms and throws himself hook, line and sinker into the hotel business by buying the now decrepit Vanderlyn Hotel. What Martin imagines – a hotel with so many amenities that guests need never leave – is a concept that continues to this day. Santana Row comes to mind – a place where people actually live at a mall. Since this novel was produced in the 90’s, I have to believe that Millhauser had some insight into the future or simply a premonition of where consumerism would arrive in 20 years.
Finally, unable to stop his own ambition and obsessive need to improve, his vision takes on the macabre with the opening of the Grand Cosmo. This is more Vegas casino than apartment building, complete with prisons and an asylum with paid actors imitating real illnesses. Who would choose to live in such a place?
I ultimately found this novel lacking in personal relationships – the exact type that would be necessary for Martin to accomplish all the things he does. His marriage is hard to believe, with Caroline most likely mentally ill and most certainly frigid. I found her shooting at Martin and Emmeline absurd. I am left, just as Martin is in the end, alone and contemplating my next move.
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