MILLICENT BELL
619
consumer desire can be created in a vacuum. A New Dressler exceeds the
old and is advertised as "MORE THAN A HOTEL: A WAY OF LIFE."
It is the largest family hotel in the world; it raises the principle of total
incorporation to a higher level still. Its many underground levels contain
parks with live squirrels and chipmunks, a complete department store, the
Atlantic City boardwalk with roller-chair rides, a series of "Vacation
Retreats" with campgrounds, pine forests, flowing streams with trout in
them, mineral spas, cruise ships traveling on simulated ocean waves, all the
great art museums with copies of their famous contents, and complete
replicas of famous places like Shakespeare's birthplace or the canals of
Venice with actors skillfully taking parts in authentic costumes. And
Martin's dream, having attained this surreal realization, prompts an even
more audacious effort to replace the real. A new, even larger building, with
even more underground worlds, the Grand Cosmosarium, opens in 1905.
Everything that has ever happened, every imaginable experience, is avail–
able within it. But the public begins to be frightened; there are reports of
horrors on the lowest sub-basement levels, few tenants apply, and, before
long, it is slated for demolition. As in a fable the ending implies a moral
when, one day, after months when he has not ventured outdoors, Martin
wanders out of his doomed Grand Cosmo and is almost blinded by the
real sun and blue sky as he sits on a bench and watches a barge slide down
the river.
Martin Dressler's life contains more than I have related-for he is a
real man, after all, with some meager interest in other things than super–
hotels. He discovers sex with rich Mrs. Hamilton when he is still a bellboy
and manages to resist the adoration of a younger hotel guest by patroniz–
ing a nearby whorehouse. In time, he makes the acquaintance of a mother
and her two daughters and is caught for a while in a web of erotic suspense
in his relation with the three, but marries the beautiful but frigid
Caroline-a sort of Sleeping Beauty whom he cannot awaken. Her sister,
Emmeline, becomes his business assistant and shares his dreams but the
woman who really turns him on with her melancholy submissiveness is
one of the hotel maids. A good many pages of the novel are occupied with
this depressing erotic history which seems an odd undercurrent to its
major theme. Does Millhauser intend a reinforcing moral? Does the nov–
elist want to imply that his hero's grandiose "American dream" is the
obsession of a man who has lost the capacity for fulfilling the novel's old–
est theme-a love story? A somewhat trite idea, if so, and hardly
convincing. But a bizarre and profound magic realism makes the rest of
the novel-Millhauser's historical vision-mesmerizing.
