Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer is a 1996 novel by Steven Millhauser.
The eponymous Martin Dressler is an entrepreneur in late 19th/early 20th century New York. The story starts out in 1881 with Martin, aged nine, helping out in his father's cigar shop. Even as a boy Martin is full of ideas, and is put in charge of his dad's window displays. Martin gets a job as a bellhop in a hotel and starts a meteoric rise, clerk, secretary to the manager, assistant manager. However, he quits the hotel, because he has even bigger ambitions.
Those ambitions start out with a restaurant, and then a chain of restaurants, and then Martin winds up buying the hotel he used to work in. He constructs bigger, grander hotels. But will he eventually go too far? While all of that's going on, he makes a disastrous marriage to Caroline, a pretty woman who is shy to the point of near catatonia, while ignoring her less pretty but far more suitable sister Emmeline.
Tropes:
- Ambiguously Gay: One scene hints that Caroline's complete lack of any sex drive might be because she's a lesbian. Caroline, usually so inert that she's almost a mannequin, makes a friend named Claire. They start going out for teas and lunches. Caroline starts focusing all her attention on Claire. When Claire starts paying more attention to Martin, Emmeline says "Caroline's jealous of you." Emmeline uses the words "crush" and "intense friendships" to describe Caroline's attachments to other women. Emmeline further explains that Caroline's crushes always end because she demands complete attention from her friends, and sure enough eventually Caroline stops seeing Claire.
- Betty and Veronica: Caroline and Emmeline Vernon, the sisters who become central to Martin's life. Caroline is fair-haired and beautiful and very shy and demure. Emmeline is described as dark, and not as pretty as Caroline, and very talkative and flirty and interested in Martin's ideas and plans.
- Big Applesauce: New York City is basically a character in its own, with the novel being set around the turn of the 20th century as New York was undergoing explosive growth. Martin is very excited by the rapid pace of modernization in New York, with construction of large buildings and a subway.
- Call-Back:
- Early in the novel Martin, as a boy, is fascinated to see a group of actors at the Vanderlyn rehearsing. Near the end he hires actors to pretend to be guests at the Grand Cosmo, in a desperate effort to make his failing hotel look successful.
- At the beginning of the book Martin is helping out in his dad's cigar store. In the last paragraph, with the Grand Cosmo facing complete failure, Martin thinks about "doing something in a cigar store."
- Day Hurts Dark-Adjusted Eyes: At the end of the novel, when it's become clear that the Grand Cosmo is a failure that will bankrupt Martin, he leaves the hotel to go for a walk."He walked through the lobby to the heavy glass entrance doors, and when he pushed one open, he stopped: the light was so bright that he had to shut his eyes....Suns danced in the red of his closed eyes. He hadn't left the Grand Cosmo for a long time."
- Lie Back and Think of England: After finally getting The Talk from her mother, Caroline lets Martin have sex with her, but she is completely inert, lying motionless while he humps away. Eventually Martin stops having sex with her at all, because he doesn't enjoy it.
- Magical Realism: Most of the book seems grounded in reality, but the Grand Cosmo, the white elephant of a hotel that Martin builds and which bankrupts him, becomes more and more fantastical until it clearly is something that could not exist in the early 20th century. The hotel has whole artificially instructed environments, like caves, a forest with a river (and fish!), a "Temple of Poesy" where performers recite poetry, a whole floor dedicated to historical reenactments of stuff like Lincoln's assassination, and other absurdities. The hotel also extends twelve floors underground. The overall effect is to describe something that sounds like a Disney theme park, but somehow in a single hotel in the early 1900s.
- Old-Timey Bathing Suit: As a boy Martin goes swimming, donning "a heavy dark-blue flannel suit with itchy straps over the shoulders."
- Once Upon a Time: The book opens with this sentence: "There once lived a man named Martin Dressler, a shopkeeper's son, who rose from modest beginnings to a height of dreamlike good fortune." The suggestion is the American dream as represented by Martin is a fairy tale, which in this instance ends tragically.
- The Quiet One: Caroline is an extremely quiet person, hardly ever stringing more than four words together and being repeatedly described as casting her eyes to the ground. She is so quiet that Martin even has Emmeline make his wedding proposal for him, as talking to Caroline directly is infeasible.
- Rich Bitch: Mrs. Louise Hamilton, a guest at the Vanderlyn who irritates all the staff, including Martin's fellow bellhops, with her nonstop complaining and endless demands. She winds up taking teenaged Martin's virginity.
- Self-Made Man: Martin is the genuine article, working his way up from bellhop to owner of a chain of restaurants and several hotels.
- Sex Sells: Discussed Trope in a scene where Martin is hiring Harwinton, the cynical ad man, to advertise his new hotel. Harwinton shows Martin an advertisement for a fountain pen, of all things, which shows a woman in "tight corseting" with a "full bosom and well-defined rump" looking over the desk of the man with the pen.
- Sibling Triangle: Martin's relationship with Caroline and Emmeline Vernon. He marries Caroline, because she is good-looking. Unfortunately she is also vapid and inert and eventually Martin stops spending time with her and instead starts spending all his time with her sister. Emmeline is clearly far better suited for Martin, and also clearly holds feelings for him, but he doesn't pursue her because she isn't pretty. This is explicitly stated, as in one passage Martin berates himself for marrying "the wrong sister" but also admits to himself that he simply isn't sexually attracted to Emmeline.
- Stealing from the Till: Martin fires a cashier at one of his restaurants for stealing "fifty dollars a day."
- The Talk: Caroline never got it, as she recoils in horror from Martin on their wedding night. Martin angrily goes to her mother Margaret and demands that Margaret "tell her" and "instruct her about marriage." Caroline lets Martin have sex with her after the talk, but the sex is terrible.
