Martin Dressler : The Tale of an American Dreamer (Vintage Contemporaries)

Rating:
Summary: American Builder/ Dreamer,almost worthy of Dante's Inferno
Review: During the 1890's New York City, like America itself, was bursting at the seams with invention,construction,art, immigrants, and just about everything else too! There was the great 1893 Columbiana Expo, and the great cities were trying to outdo one another. Enter a youthful cigar store clerk from the Upper West Side with some big dreams, and the willpower and finesse to carry them out.This book starts out as the realistic story of a self-made hotel builder extraordinaire (like Hilton,and much later Trump). His visions become truly bizarre, and so do his hotels, fantasy and science fiction like. No doubt Mr. Milhauser is an extraordinary wordsmith, and this book deserves the Pulitzer Prize it was awarded.

Rating:
Summary: Not up to expectations
Review: I tried very hard to finish it, but...

How could it being rewarded the Pulitzer Prize???? There is no story in it and nowhere it leads you to?

There are so many good books around, so don't waste your valuable time on this one.

Rating:
Summary: Learn to appreciate good Literature; It is not always happy.
Review: I was very diappointed in reading the other readers' reviews of this book. I think many of the readers simply read for pleasure, with no desire to come away from a book enriched by an author's ideas and commentaries. I happen to believe that Martin Dressler has a wonderful storyline, but even if one does not like the plot, he should try to appreciate the book for what it is: a work of literature, not a popular romance novel or thriller. One aspect of the book that other readers have continually faulted is the fact that Martin's dreams become more and more outrageous as the novel continues. If one considers Martin's fantastic dreams to be a fault, he has obviously missed the point of this fantastic novel. Martin Dressler shows its readers how dreams can be misplaced, and how dreams can be totally inappropriate, although they seem to be fabulous to the dreamer. Martin had a need to build the perfect world, and from Martin we can learn that the idiosyncracies of life are the very essence of life itself; without imperfections, life becomes dull no matter what the scale.

Rating:
Summary: It may have won a Pulitzer, but it didn't win me over
Review: MARTIN DRESSLER won the Pulitzer for fiction in the mid-90s, so I've assumed it had to be pretty good. And for what it is -- a fable -- it's not bad. It begins, "There once was a man named Martin Dressler, a shopkeeper's son, who rose from modest beginnings to a height of dreamlike good fortune." And that's what you get -- 293 pages of prose detailing Dressler's increasingly-fanciful entrepreneurial visions.

It's good stuff if you enjoy a fable, complete with prose with echoes of a children's story. Me, I didn't want to read a fable. I wanted more showing and less telling -- more character, more conflict, more plot.

So: 3 stars from me. Not a bad novel, mostly enjoyable, but as Pulitzer-winners go, somewhat disappointing.

Rating:
Summary: Just enough to whet your appetite
Review: Steven Millhauser's lyrical and dreamlike style finds an ideal outlet in the story of Martin Dressler, a turn-of-the-last century businessman in New York who rises from bellhop to mogul and then watches his dreams crash to earth. Unlike many modern novels, "Dressler" is at its most interesting when describing Martin's business dealings and the workings and secrets of his palace-like hotels. The unconvincing love affairs don't seem to hold Millhauser's attention, and it feels like he abandons them in exasperation at a certain point. The energy of the novel runs out of steam in tandem with Martin's empire, but I found myself wanting much more. Perhaps Millhauser can take a longer sabbatical next time and create the epic he was born to write.

Rating:
Summary: What Do the Pulitzers' Look For??
Review: This book is okay - just okay. I bought it on the basis of being a Pulitzer winner - oh well.

It could probably make some freshman lit student a good term paper to discuss American industrial ambition being primary over personal relationships, etc. Unfortunately, a good prof would say that message was way to apparent.

The main character keeps building and building bigger and more unique hotels until finally things go awry. One of the biggest problems I had with the book is there was page after page after page of lists of things Martin Dressler put into his hotels. The author must have spent nights developing these lists - either that or tapped into a "Disney's most outrageous rides ideas" web site.

Some of the writing was interesting and as was much of the book. It was just overdone. I believe that was the author's intent to help drive home to the reader the grandiose ideas of his character. However, it tended to get tedious.

A different book from the norm, I was not disappointed I took the time to read it. I just would not have given it a big-time prize.

Rating:
Summary: Part "documentary", part allegory, engaging story
Review: This is a curious story, set in the late 1800's and early 1900's, and capturing the rise of young entrepreneur, Martin Dressler. Seemingly marked for prominence in the dizzying property development surge in New York City at that time, we see him progress further and further, ultimately imparting the City with gaudy and fantastical displays of high kitsch and amusement, in the guise of hotels that are fitted with the kind of displays seen in present day "Ripley's Believe it or Not" Museums. Dressler has the bigger is better mentality that seems to infect the Donald Trump's of this world, with each grand hotel scheme outdoing the last. He is carried along by his success, and it seems that he has never had time to reflect on what is beautiful or important. He is afflicted with a lack of time, as he realizes during the course of his meteoric rise.

I found Martin to be probably representative of many such entrepreneurial successes of the time; neglectful of his inner life and personal needs, except in surges of blind ego or selfishness; there is a void in the giving of oneself in any meaningful way to other people. I felt a little detached from him, losing sympathy with the character as the story went on. The important people in his life all start to fade into obscurity as he isolates himself in his successes. His downfall would seem to be in having lost touch with the real world, trying to create a dreamworld within the hotel confines, and succeeding in creating only, as one architectural reviewer within the book comments, a hotel that "extravagance and flamboyance and hunger had carried to such heights of success as to turn into the grotesque...a culmination of deplorable tendencies."

One can marvel at the vision and energy that Dressler gave to his projects, but ultimately you feel a sadness that in his building on such a grand scale you see a man losing himself. This could be an allegory for America, with its unquenchable lust for the big and extreme, its voracious appetite for growth and progress at the expense of its soul. That makes this an important book, and one that I hope has a wide audience.

Rating:
Summary: Martin Dressler and the Protestant Ethic
Review: This is a tale of a poor young man who achieves success by the traditional American means of working hard. Martin Dressler is also a man of vision and imagination. He rises, step by step (or rather by leaps and bounds) from a simple clerk in his father's cigar store to a wealthy and successful hotel magnate. Martin Dressler lives in New York City in the early part of the 20th century. A young man ahead of his time, he eventually over-reaches himself by building an extravaganza of a hotel that the public simply does not understand and, thus, does not patronize. This is so much unlike his other business ventures which caught fire time and time again with the public. The end of the novel suggests that Martin Dressler, like an earlier era Donald Trump, will bounce back from financial disaster.

While I found the Martin Dressler tale easy to read and interesting to follow all the way through, I felt that its Horatio Alger story-line rather old fashioned and a little corny. It probably won the Pulitzer Prize because it stuck to the traditional American values held by that committee. I was also baffled how a man as modern, intelligent and intuitive as Martin Dressler could have chosen for a wife a young woman as dull and uncommunicative as Caroline, other than that she was very pretty. Was it so shocking to him that she was also "frigid?" I found his naivite in this regard hard to believe. His friendship and reliance on the business acumen of Caroline's much less attractive sister is easier to understand.

Rating:
Summary: Mixed reaction
Review: Well written, fast moving, and a refreshing portrayal of the opportunities and pitfalls represented by the early 20th century. However, one is not overly drawn to the characters and the point of excessive grandeur and spiritual emptiness is a bit simple.

Rating:
Summary: What happens when your dreams are grander than reality?
Review: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, 1997

While I am sure that most people begin a Pulitzer Prize winning novel with excitement about the treasure they are about to read, I begin with a little trepidation. Will the novel live up to the hype of winning America's most prestigious literary prize? In several cases I was simply disappointed. So with that in mind, I began "Martin Dressler". The subtitle to this book is "The Tale of an American Dreamer", and that is exactly what this is.

The novel opens near the turn of the 20th century. Young Martin Dressler works in his father's cigar shop and from a young age he knows the business as well as any grown man. He suggests the occasional improvement to his father and the customers trust Martin nearly as much as they do Mr. Dressler, and that says something. Martin dreams of more than simply inheriting the cigar shop. He dreams grand dreams, of constantly moving up in the world, so when an opportunity arises to take a job at a local hotel, he takes it. Martin is a hard worker, and more important, he is an excellent worker. He is promoted several times and it seems as if he is being groomed for some of the top positions in the hotel (the novel jumps forward several years at times throughout the story). Martin's dreams are bigger than being stuck in the hotel and working for someone else, though, so just when he is about to be promoted even further, he resigns and opens up his own business, a cafeteria.

Naturally Martin is a success. He has been a success at everything that he does. With every success at business, he takes the business to the next level, expanding the cafeteria and opening a chain of them in the New York area. He expands even more and buys a hotel and becomes incredibly successful. With each success, Martin dreams bigger and bigger and he refuses to be satisfied with what he has, and he has a lot.

This is the story of Martin's dreams and his pursuit of his dreams, even when he doesn't quite know what he is pursuing. All Martin knows is that he wants something bigger, better, and grander. While this puts him on the path to success, it can also be the path to ruin if he does not temper his dreams with reality.

I was surprised and impressed with how much I enjoyed reading this book. It had sat on my bookshelf for several years because I just couldn't make myself start the novel, but when I did, I loved it. Despite being written in 1997, it felt a little old fashioned, but that fit perfectly to the character of the book. It is also a tale that could be told today, of modern day American dreamers and what can happen if those dreams are unchecked by reality.