Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

Martin Dressler is the son of a cigar shop owner in New York in the 1880s. He is a good boy with an unusual gift for seeing what a business could be, and he rises fast: bellhop, then hotel manager's assistant, then owner of a cigar stand, then a chain of lunchrooms, then a builder of hotels.

Each hotel is larger and stranger than the last. He gives them theatres, then shops, then interior gardens, then whole floors of imitation landscape, until he builds the Grand Cosmo, a structure meant to contain everything a person could want so that its residents will never need to go outside. Underground forests, artificial weather, actors employed to be neighbours. Nobody comes.

Alongside this he marries. He is drawn to two sisters, one warm and practical and one pale, sickly and withdrawn, and with the same certainty that makes him rich he chooses the wrong one, and the marriage becomes its own uninhabitable building.

Millhauser writes it as a fable, in cool, level, unhurried prose, with almost no interest in psychology. Characters do not have inner lives so much as functions, and dialogue is rare. If you want to know why Martin does any of this, the book will not tell you, and that refusal is the design rather than an oversight.

What it gives instead are the buildings, described floor by floor with the patience of a catalogue, until the reader feels the exact moment at which ambition stops being useful and becomes a kind of illness.

It is short, under three hundred pages, and it reads quickly if you accept its flatness early. Readers who need a character to care about will bounce off it hard. Best for readers who like Borges or Calvino and want the American version, or anyone drawn to stories about builders who cannot stop.