Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

Summary

A fable-like novel set in late-nineteenth-century New York, in which an ambitious cigar-shop boy rises through hotel work to build ever larger and more fantastical establishments, culminating in a vast, dreamlike pleasure palace. Millhauser writes in a cool, formal prose that turns the Gilded Age city into a half-magical landscape of arcades, lobbies, and imagined interiors. The book is a sly, melancholy parable of American ambition and the limits of invention.