Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

Martin Dressler: Tale of an American Dreamer

by Steven Millhauser

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize 1997

                

                This book was read almost exclusively on a hammock, which ups the enjoyment factor considerably.

                As the title suggests, this novel is about a man named Martin Dressler, an American with a dream. Dressler is the son of hard-working but unimaginative immigrants living in Manhattan in the 1880s. They own a struggling cigar shop, which Martin helps out in. Throughout the novel Martin's life becomes defined by a series of relatively bold moves. He begins arranging deliveries for his father's store, opens a franchise, gets a job as a hotel employee, saves enough to open a small cafeteria for lunch, and then begins to open new locations throughout Manhattan. He is young, he is driven, but there always seems to be something missing.

                At around this time he meets two sisters who live with their mother in his apartment building. He eats dinner with them every night, and befriends them. The two sisters are very different. Emmeline becomes his close friend and confidant. He senses that she is most impressed with the empire he is building. He eventually buys the hotel where he worked and begins to renovate it as a combination hotel/apartment space with shopping opportunities. This is a bold and innovative approach, and he gives Emmeline an important job at the hotel. It is Caroline, her younger sister that he decides to marry. Caroline is an enigmatic character. She is withholding, unimpressed by his achievements, and decides to marry him for the sole reason that he has asked her. As the novel progresses and Martin has success after success his marriage becomes more and more distant, and Martin is unable to enjoy his accomplishments.

                Again, I want to acknowledge the role that my hammock played in my enjoyment of this book. It is not as if I did not enjoy it, or find the themes interesting. It was just such an odd book. The character of Martin was described the same way a distant protagonist in a biography would be described. Until the last chapter where there was no escape from the rather heavy symbolism, I was hard pressed to remember that I was reading a work of fiction. He is driven by something undefined, something that Steven Milhauser seems to be suggesting is distinctly American. The problem, according to Milhauser, is that drive to achieve does not necessarily lead to fulfillment but only a different kind of indefinable emptiness. He is never satisfied by his achievements, but always asking "What's next?" and moving on to another project. The relationship that Martin has with his wife is part of this. He chooses a spouse who will not be an equal, but will in fact always be an unobtainable absence. I know I expected him to fall in love with Emmeline and be happy with her, but this is not how the story turns out.

                There are definitely things I liked about this book. The faux-biographical format--despite the way it made Martin's actions seem mysterious--made for a quick read. The time period was an interesting choice as well. There was something very Horatio Alger/rags-to-riches about putting this story in late 1800s New York. It was also interesting how Milhauser described the businesses that Martin opened. They were filled with imagery of Americana, suggesting that part of his appeal as a businessman was a sort of manipulation of imagery. I don't know if the connection between these images and the ultimate failure of the internal (and again, as Milhauser would describe as distinctly American) drive to create something larger is as apparent as it could have been, but I thought they were effective. 

Coming soon: Possession by A.S. Byatt.

Independence Day

Independence Day

by Richard Ford

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize 1996

       Richard Ford's sequel to The Sportswriter picks up Frank Bascombe's life about five years later. Whenever a writer takes on a sequel as opposed to creating a completely new world and characters to inhabit it, I have to wonder what the writer is trying to say, or if the writer felt like the first story was not complete.  An obvious question about a book like this is: Do I have to read the first one to understand this? In this case, the answer is no. There are references to the events of the first novel, but those references are vague and not necessary to understand the events of this novel. What remains constant is the sort of lazy way that the plot unfolds.

       In this novel it is Independence Day weekend, 1988. A substantial amount of time is dedicated to the discussion of the upcoming Bush/Dukakis showdown, a decision that apparently was supposed to reveal characters' core values. Considering how that particular election was sort of a blowout, and Frank is decidedly in the Dukakis column, I have to wonder what Ford's view of America is. Frank has left sports reporting behind, and has moved on to become a real estate agent. Having just purchased a house, I have to say I would not have wanted Frank as my agent, and I don't know where he finds clients like the ones he deals with, but suffice to say the sequences that show Frank at work were rather stressful. I am going to do some rather extemporaneous analysis of Frank's career switch, like jazz. A home is a metaphor for a life, and Frank is acting as an agent of transition and redefinition...much like the American Declaration of Independence.
          Frank is, again, deeply into a relationship that seems like it could go one way or another. This time he is seeing a woman who used to be married to a classmate of his who went crazy in Vietnam and abandoned her upon returning to the US. After a decade has passed she is with Frank and contemplating redefining herself as the former Mrs. So and So and become the new Mrs. Frank Bascombe. Frank would like to become the new husband of this woman, while at the same time he can't let go of his old wife. Here she has a name. Ann. Not X. It is a wonderful promotion. Ann is remarried now, and has moved away from the small town where they lived as a couple and spent the first few years of their divorce. Frank is not completely ready to let go. He has purchased her old home, and is living in it, an obvious signal to the reader that in order to give his new relationship a chance, he has some work to do. And again, we look at that jazzy ole metaphor for the home as a life.

      Oh, and their surviving son, Paul, has apparently lost his marbles. Frank has decided to take Paul on a trip to the Baseball and Basketball Halls of Fame for some father/son time, but just prior to this Paul has attacked his new stepfather with an oar, stolen the family car, and wrecked it. Their time together seems to be what the action of the novel will deal with, but Richard Ford is, again, glacially slow here, and the novel is well into the second half before the two characters get together. Which was fine with me. Paul was among the more annoying characters I've read in awhile. I wouldn't go so far as say he was literary birth control, but he was hardly sympathetic.

      I do not have wonderful things to say about this book. It was exceedingly competent, and had some very moving and poignant moments, but was in some ways rather exhausting. While I admire Richard Ford's extreme attention to the train of thought of Frank Bascombe, the thematic elements of the novel were not very subtle. I mentioned when I wrote up The Sportswriter that these books make up a trilogy. The third book was not listed as a Time top 100, nor is it a Pulitzer winner so I don't have to read it to cross it off my list. That doesn't mean I'll never read it, but without making myself duty-bound I don't know if I will ever be tempted. The only thing that I think would push me to read it is the fact that I have read the first two books, and I hate leaving things off lists of any sort uncrossed. Yeah, I probably will read it. 

Coming soon:  Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser.

The Sportswriter

The Sportswriter

by Richard Ford

Featured on the Time Magazine Top 100

                Frank Bascombe, the central character of The Sportswriter, is a difficult individual to pin down.  He is an individual who seems to care very deeply about the people in his life, but is also extremely self-centered. I guess it is in that conflict of self that the novel finds the bulk of the tension. It certainly isn't the plot, which meanders from point A to point B at a glacial pace.  

                The novel opens with Bascombe, at the start of Easter weekend, meeting his ex-wife at the grave of their dead son...whose grave is right next to Bascombe's backyard. Clearly, we as readers are being set up. We are beginning with a past that did not work, filled with pain, and a future that begins with rebirth on Easter. And, yes, that is kind of what happens. Here is the plan. Bascombe wants to leave the graveyard, pick up his girlfriend to go on a romantic (sort of) trip to Detroit, come back, and have a nice meal with his girlfriend's family. And for the most part, that is exactly how this goes down. But, because we open at a graveyard we have to deal with the past. I expected that most of the flashbacks would deal with Bascombe's relationship with his son, but instead the focus of the flashbacks is mostly on career and relationship choices. Initially, it turned out, Bascombe had wanted to be a novelist. He had written a highly regarded book of short fiction, had gotten married and moved to a quiet community where he was treated like a rising star in the literary world before he decided to abandon his novel and write for a sports magazine. The expectation of a reader would be that Bascombe would look back on this as a mistake, that writing for the magazine would seem like taking the path of least resistance, and he would look back at that choice as a compromise. But for the most part he is completely satisfied with his career. He also talks about his marriage to a woman who is referred to in this novel only as "X." His marriage to X seems to be a happy one from what Bascombe chooses to reveal. However, after the death of their oldest son, he engages in a series of affairs and the marriage unravels. Again, this is not something that Bascombe treats with any real sense of regret, or, maybe more accurately he does not take the blame. 

                There are a couple of ways to look at this. One is that he is a callous character, and sometimes I definitely opted for this interpretation. Another, is that he is living in the moment, and that while he is aware of his past, he is trying to move forward. Neither interpretation makes him a likeable character. Indeed, there are many times throughout the course of the novel that I thought he was kind of a scumbag. But as he goes about his Easter weekend it is hard not to root for him to make choices that will make his life better, or at the very least make him feel more fulfilled. The story does throw some curveballs at Frank. A member of a divorced men's group confides in him that he has just had a homosexual encounter after his wife left him. An interview subject that Frank was supposed to be writing an article about turns out to be mentally unhinged. Frank's doctor, who he personally despises, may be having an affair with X.

                I did not enjoy this book as much as I wanted to. Frank Bascombe is an interesting character, but I had a really hard time identifying with him when he talked about how he dealt with bad things in his life. And the novel is so in his head, that if you aren't sold on him as a character, you will not find reading the book a rewarding experience. This is actually the first book in a trilogy. The second book, Independence Day, won the Pulitzer for 1996. That will be the next book I write up. I think it is telling that I do not have a burning interest to read the third book. It was announced in 2007 that HBO would turn the three novels into a 6-part miniseries, and it would be directed by James Mangold. That was 2007, so I am assuming that the project fell apart.

                                                         

Coming soon: Independence Day by Richard Ford.