Martin Dressler

Historical fiction · Fable

First published: 1996
Print length: 294 pagesCrown, 1996

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1997

Description

Martin Dressler begins in his immigrant father’s cigar shop and discovers an instinct for anticipating what customers want. In late-nineteenth-century New York, that talent carries him through the ranks of the Vanderlyn hotel, into restaurant ownership, and toward increasingly elaborate ventures of his own. Emmeline Vernon becomes his practical business partner, while his marriage to her distant sister Caroline leaves him emotionally stranded. Martin’s gift for organizing spaces, workers, and pleasures gradually expands into the Grand Cosmo, an all-encompassing hotel conceived as a world unto itself. As commercial ambition shades into private obsession, the novel tests the unstable boundaries between invention and delusion, art and industry, and the American promise of endless growth and the emptiness it may conceal.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Atmospheric · Descriptive · Lyrical

Pace

Measured

Tone

Cerebral · Melancholic · Reflective · Wistful

Structure

Linear

Focus

Character · Ideas · Relationships

Emotional intensity

3 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

AmbitionClassMarriageObsessionWealthWork

About Steven Millhauser

Steven Millhauser is an American novelist and short story writer whose fiction brings elaborate fantasy into exact contact with ordinary life. His prose is descriptive and carefully controlled, often granting impossible events the sober clarity of documented fact. He favors patient escalation, as inventions, entertainments, and private obsessions expand by measured degrees until wonder becomes coercive or dangerous. The Barnum Museum assembles self-contained encounters with spectacles that unsettle the boundary between reality and appearance, while Dangerous Laughter stretches familiar habits and institutions toward the uncanny. His novels use equally deliberate structures. Martin Dressler follows a businessman whose instinct for organizing spaces and pleasures culminates in the Grand Cosmo, a hotel conceived as a complete world. Edwin Mullhouse adopts the solemn apparatus of literary biography to chronicle a child writer, allowing the narrator’s interpretive zeal to darken its comedy. Millhauser also varies perspective with purpose. The title story of The Knife Thrower speaks through a fascinated communal audience, while Enchanted Night moves among restless townspeople and seemingly animate objects, gathering separate impulses into a nocturnal procession.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Crown
Language: English
ISBN: 9780517703199

Keep your books and notes in Collected for iPhone.

Apple Books is a service mark of Apple Inc. iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.