Martin Dressler, by Steven Millhauser

This story takes place in turn of the century New York City, circa 1897. Broadway is still referred to as the Boulevard and much of the land north of Times Square is still fields, streams, valleys with occasional large buildings, hotels and mansions scattered about. Martin Dressler is a cigar-maker's son who dreams of great and wonderful things and uses his energy and vision to make them real. He starts as a bell-hop in a hotel and rises to first run hotels and then build hotels - great dream-like, unconventional hotels. He has odd relationships with women - most notably three women of the same family. One daughter he marries, the other daughter becomes his best friend (symbolically they are the same person - the one he marries for her physical attributes and the other for everything else); the mother, fleetingly a sexual object, becomes his surrogate mother. His true mother and father are peripheral characters, at best. The story reads easily, is well crafted, full of imagery and imparts a sense of what NYC was like at that time (horses in the street, motorized vehicles rare, gas lamps ubiquitous, the smell of dung, and so forth). It tells us that it is great to dream and when the dreams fail, either to materialize or when they materialize to be something other than what you expected, life is still wonderful. Martin Dressler is a model of how we should dream and strive to make them real. But he is also a lesson on damaged relations and what happens when we subordinate everything else to our dreams (see Melville's Ahab for a classic example). In the end, a wonderful story and a great read.