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Tag Archives: Pulitzer Prize

Create Expectations: Martin Dressler

24 Monday May 2021

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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beautiful prose, book review, entrepreneurial fever, Gilded Age, grandiosity, historical fiction, literary fiction, narcissistic protagonist, New York City, predictable narrative, Pulitzer Prize, rags-to-riches story, Steven Millhauser, story arc, technology versus tradition

Review: Martin Dressler, by Steven Millhauser
Random House, 1996. 293 pp. $17

Martin Dressler is nine years old in 1881, when he has his first business idea, to dress the window of his father’s Manhattan tobacco shop in a distinctive way. The boy works hard for the shop and has for several years; the Dresslers are dour German immigrants to whom work and thrift come naturally. Pleasure, affection, or satisfaction have no place, suspect as the harbingers of ruin.

From these humble beginnings, Martin makes his way in the New York in the 1890s, earning astonishing success, even as a teenager. Through clever anticipation of customers’ wants, constant willingness to revise his approach, and an innate grasp of what constitutes service, young Martin constructs an empire. He learns how to tap into expectations and, later, to create them.

Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World Building on Manhattan’s Park Row, which opened in 1890, was the city’s tallest at the time (undated image, but older than 1920, courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Millhauser excels at presenting New York, a city under rapid expansion, so that it appears almost like a child learning to walk and talk, and from whom we anticipate great things. Everyone has an idea, it seems, as though entrepreneurs stand on every corner, awaiting their chance at the big time. Consequently, though Martin may seem larger than life, he fits right in, except that he thinks more boldly than most.

He personifies several themes, one of which involves fascination with modern technology, which promises to make daily life easier, alongside a contradictory desire to remain in the past, anchored to what people already know. Accordingly, architecture and decorative styles figure heavily, and the author details them down to the smallest brick. His people hunger for the newness and their ability to possess it, yet fear what they might have lost, leaving behind what they grew up with.

I admire Millhauser’s finely wrought depiction of these changes, which feel both exterior and personal. Martin Dressler won the Pulitzer Prize and has been rightly celebrated for its prose and descriptive marvels, making the New York of bygone years into a character. One passage, when Martin brings three friends, a mother and her two daughters, for a ride on the Elevated (the aboveground precursor of the subway), conveys this well:

With its peaked gables and its gingerbread trim, the station looked like a country cottage raised on iron columns.… Sunlight poured through the blue stained-glass windows and lay in long blue parallelograms on the floor. Outside on the roof platform they looked down at rows of striped awnings over the shop windows of Columbus Avenue, each with its patch of shade, and watched the black roofs of passing hacks. Suddenly there was a throbbing in the platform, a growing roar — people stepped back. Mrs. Vernon gripped Martin’s arm, white smoke mixed with fiery ashes streamed backward as the engine neared, and with a hiss of steam and a grinding sound like the clashing of many pairs of scissors, the train halted at the platform.

I like Millhauser’s deft, subtle touch, in which he plumbs nascent, unexpressed desires, followed often by rapid, impulsive action. You never know quite what to expect — for the first half of the novel, anyway — which keeps the pages turning.

However, the narrative depends entirely on one character, and Martin grows tiresome. In the beginning, you want him to break his restraints, venture out on his own, find his fortune. But nothing ever satisfies him, and he doesn’t know why, nor does he bother to think about it, much. That may be true to life, especially for someone who grew up with nothing but work and duty.

But past a certain point, there’s a diminishing return. As Martin grows ever grander in his visions, longing to create something so splendid, even he’ll be happy, you know what will result. You also know that in courting a particular woman — and what a bizarre courtship — he’s heading for trouble. Where the first half of the narrative feels volatile, the second half settles into predictability.

More significantly, Martin’s the only character whose inner life comes across, and success erodes his appeal, which leaves the reader nowhere to go. Our hero talks only of his business plans, get easily annoyed if anyone criticizes them, and seems to understand, or want to understand, people only in relation to himself. A narcissist, in other words, bent on greater and greater grandiosity. In keeping with that portrait, there are only so many descriptions of decorative garishness that I can take, so I wound up flipping through some of them.

Martin Dressler the novel is beautifully written and evocative, but Martin Dressler the man is hard to approach, full of much, yet empty. I think that’s the point, and it comes with no surprise.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Happy Birthday: This Blog Is Two Years Old

27 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Amy Greene, Andrea Molesini, Barry Unsworth, book review, Chris Cleave, historical fiction, Julian Barnes, literary fiction, Mary Renault, Patrick O'Brian, Paul Goldberg, Pulitzer Prize, Shirley Barrett, Stewart O'Nan, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Winston Graham

Once more, thank you for visiting. Whether you’re a regular reader or just dropping by, I’m glad you’ve come and hope you take away something that stays with you. You’re the reason I do this; without you, there’d be no point.

As I did last year, I’ll briefly recap my favorite books from the last twelve months. They belong to different genres within historical fiction, but from each I’ve taken away something that stays with me.

In no particular order, I particularly recommend these:

Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, by Chris Cleave, tells a marvelously observed, wrenching tale of a love triangle during World War II. Think you’ve been there, done that? You haven’t, until you’ve read this one.

Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth, explores Britain’s eighteenth-century slave trade to depict the human urge that puts profit before morality, decency, or empathy. So many novels have overdrawn, flat antagonists, but this book has two utterly real, compelling villains, one of many facets to this brilliant work of literature.

Stewart O’Nan’s thriller, City of Secrets, set in Jerusalem in 1945, portrays in elegant, tense economy the struggle to liberate Palestine, both against the British and among the Jewish organizations fighting them, with a political romance at the center.

Rush Oh!, Shirley Barrett’s delicate, lovely story about whaling in Australia around the turn of the twentieth century, surprises with its humor, compassion, and home truths about selflessness and its opposite.

Long Man, Amy Greene’s elegy for a dying town in 1936, tells how the Tennessee Valley Authority’s dam building raises issues of blood, land, and power. Greene’s rugged, potent prose and deceptively simple premise deliver a haunting novel.

You don’t have to like stories of wooden ships and iron men to appreciate Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander, the first installment of the famous series about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Yes, O’Brian knows so much about the sea, it’s effortless, like breathing, but he shows the same touch with the English language and his main characters’ inner lives.

Andrea Molesini’s Not All Bastards Are From Vienna deals squarely with the First World War’s injustice, cruelty, and stupidity, yet is thoroughly engaging, thanks to the characters’ ingenuity, forcefulness, and mordant wit. They’re larger than life yet wholly plausible, the secret of great fiction.

Mary Renault’s classic, The Bull From the Sea, tells the story of Theseus, in such a way that the well-known myth becomes a deep, thought-provoking manifesto on the use of power and the virtue of forbearance. I wish our politicians were half as sensible.

Winston Graham’s Ross Poldark, the first of many volumes in another famous series, tells about an eighteenth-century iconoclast in Cornwall who tries to reform his life and lands–and then meets a young girl who’s an absolute firecracker.

In The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes re-creates the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Russian composer who just manages to escape’s Stalin’s purges and often wonders whether he made the right choice. A riveting, darkly funny story.

Paul Goldberg, in The Yid, also revisits the Stalin years, supposing that the Great Leader was planning a second Holocaust in the 1950s, and that his antagonist is a former actor from the state Yiddish Theater. Fiction doesn’t get any bolder–or more absurdly real–than this.

Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for The Sympathizer, and he deserved it. A riveting-to-the-eyeballs tale about the Vietnam War, told in flawless prose from the vantage point of a Communist mole within the South Vietnamese intelligence service, this novel skewers both sides and everyone connected with them. Superb.

Anything you particularly liked during the last year?

 

Harsh Necessity: The Secret Chord

12 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

adultery, Bible, bloodshed, civilization, David, dramatic tension, Geraldine Brooks, historical fiction, Israel, Nathan, prophecy, Pulitzer Prize, Solomon, Tanakh

Review: The Secret Chord, by Geraldine Brooks
Viking, 2015. 302 pp. $28

The stories are so well known they’re common metaphors. When one person, athletic team, or military force faces a much larger, stronger opponent, we talk of David confronting Goliath. If we hear of adultery that leads to murder, the case evokes David and Bathsheba. Everyone knows, too, how the first king of Israel was a celebrated warrior, political leader, poet, musician, and judge, yet how a prophet’s rebuke made him repent while at the height of his power.

The Tel Dan stele, one piece of archeological evidence for David's kingdom (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

The Tel Dan stele, one piece of archeological evidence for David’s kingdom (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Or maybe not, if you read this magnificent, powerful, intensely gripping novel, which reimagines the biblical hero in his glory and fatal flaws. Brooks shows David’s daring, passion, devotion, ability to listen, grasp of military and political strategy, his occasional efforts to restrain the blood lust of the age, and his unmatched singing voice, beautiful verse, and cries of rage or grief. In other words, she explores why people followed, loved, and believed in him, and how he forged a kingdom out of warring tribes, but also why his vanity, arrogance, sexual appetites, and blindness to misdeeds (his own and his favorites’) caused so much misery and jeopardized his entire enterprise. Perhaps most important, the bloodshed and cruelty that David calls necessary to create a strong central government and, thereby, curtail unnecessary bloodshed and cruelty, keeps circling through the narrative, just as it has circled throughout human history.

How does Brooks manage to convey all this while sustaining the tension of a story written thousands of years ago? On first reading, I see several ways. First, though David is the object of everyone’s attention, he’s not the protagonist; Natan, his conscience, is. (Throughout, Brooks uses Hebrew names for people and places.) Like all prophets, Natan often wishes he didn’t have his gift, which keeps him from living like other men and evokes a mixture of fear, awe, disbelief, and misunderstanding.

However, it also saves his life. When David, then a rebel outlaw, puts a village to the sword for having refused to share food with his soldiers, the ten-year-old Natan watches his father die. Then it’s Natan’s turn, whereupon he falls into a fit and pronounces the fateful prophecy of great things. Naturally, the soldiers think it’s a performance, if brilliantly done; they don’t believe what they can’t see or touch. But David brings the fledgling seer into his household, where he eventually becomes a trusted adviser, and you get the idea that it’s not just David’s ego that has guided him but his talent for seeing beyond surfaces.

Even so, for Natan, his calling cuts more than one way. First, intense physical and emotional anguish always presage and accompany his prophetic utterances, so that he’s completely outside himself and can’t hear his own words. If it happens among other people, he can only find out what he’s said after he recovers, though meanwhile, he sees how his listeners react. That separation puts him at a disadvantage. Secondly, though his status protects him, when Natan speaks to the king and the generals in his own guise, he’s risking his neck, especially if they think he’s criticizing them. It’s a delicate balance for Natan, who must resist the temptation to pretend that certain words come from God when they don’t, and he can be sure that these powerful men will ask. Further, contrary to what they assume, he doesn’t see how things will come to be, only what will be. Consequently, his presence at their councils creates tension, as do his divided feelings, and much rides on what he chooses to say or keep to himself.

The narrative of course grows much flesh on the bones of an oft-told story, but Brooks never lets her inventiveness betray her characters. For instance, how she shows David winning his epic combat with a slingshot, or how she explains why Batsheva was bathing on her roof, make perfect sense for the people involved. You know that these things will happen, but you don’t know how, or how people will view them, and that adds drama as well.

Then there’s the prose, though which Brooks re-creates an ancient landscape and ways of thought until you can practically touch them. Take this example, when Natan leaves his burning, corpse-ridden village forever, his father yet unburied, and his mother refuses to say goodbye:

I felt, in her shunning, the first of many turnings-away. It was hard for a child to feel that ebbing love, to sense an estrangement that I could do nothing to gainsay. For my part, I still loved her as much as I had the moment before my mouth opened and the words poured out of me. But like the leper when the first lesion darkens and pits his skin, I was marked in her eyes, blemished, unlovable.

As for quibbles, I do wish Brooks had scrapped the prologue; I dislike them, and they feel gimmicky. The narrative switches time perspectives, leaving me in the dust on occasion, though I caught up soon enough. Finally, when the five-year-old Shlomo (Solomon) speaks words that he’d later set down in Ecclesiastes, that feels a bit precious, much as I love their wisdom. He’s a prodigy, sure, but it’s actually more meaningful that Brooks stresses David’s vanity, a subtle contrast with the philosophy that his son would later express.

This is the fourth novel of Brooks’s I’ve read (see my review of Year of Wonders, January 5). But I like this one the best of any, and I wouldn’t be surprised if The Secret Chord, like March, earned her a Pulitzer Prize.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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