FICTION

MARTIN DRESSLER: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser (Crown: $24; 304 pp.). Horatio Alger would have felt right at home with the material of Steven Millhauser’s latest novel. The hero, Martin Dressler, is the son of an immigrant German cigar-store owner in turn-of-the-century New York. Bright, personable and hard-working, guided by life’s “friendly powers,” Dressler becomes one of the merchandising geniuses who transformed American commerce into what it is today. He parlays a job as a bellboy into ownership of a chain of cafes and, later, a series of increasingly elaborate hotels. His ultimate creation, the Grand Cosmo--30 stories above ground, 13 below--seems to contain all that human beings could imagine; it’s a place, as he envisions it, that nobody would ever want to leave.

Alger, however, wouldn’t have written such a beguilingly creepy parable about the origins of the impulse that has given our culture Disneyland and Las Vegas. Millhauser (“Edwin Mullhouse,” “The Barnum Museum”) shows the super-practical Dressler to be, at bottom, an innocent--confused about sex, driven in his rise to wealth by dreams that have little to do with money, unable to explain why he marries the ghostly Caroline Vernon rather than her sister, Emmeline, who actively helps him in business. This novel is like one of Dressler’s hotels--built “to introduce every mechanical improvement without fail, and at the same time to emphasize the past . . . in decor.” Millhauser’s ornate prose and hypnotic accumulation of period detail are the camouflage for a very modern story about how the rush to embrace the future--ever more, bigger, newer--can finally leave everything human behind.