TRUMP, THE EARLY DAYS

By R.Z. Sheppard

Why do novelists like to stereotype American entrepreneurs as single-minded and heartless? Perhaps because so many are. Herman Melville set the tone in 1857 with The Confidence-Man. Mark Twain later brought the national style of go-getting to popular perfection in Huckleberry Finn. An adult rereading of that masterpiece reveals a hierarchy of hustlers, from runaway slave Jim and his fortune-telling hair ball to the outlandish charlatans calling themselves the King and the Duke.

At the other literary extreme, Horatio Alger's heroes triumphed through trustworthiness, diligence and stupefying practicality. As usual, the truth about the business world lies somewhere between comic cynicism and Rotarian sentimentality, in a psychological wilderness area now artfully surveyed by Steven Millhauser's Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (Crown; 294 pages; $24).

Set in New York City at the turn of the century, this tale of a young man, a real-estate dreamer, embodies both the realities and the fantasies of a growing nation infatuated with its own possibilities. Dressler is only nine years old when he builds a display that makes the 5' cigars in his father's tobacco shop look more expensive. As a teenage bellhop, he boosts sales at a hotel concession. In 1894 at the age of 22, he opens the Metropolitan Lunchroom and Billiard Parlor, a winning concept that is expanded northward into the newly developing acreage bordering Central Park.

Among the pleasures of Millhauser's fourth novel, which continues in the author's previous vein of treating American history with dreamlike obsession, are descriptions of Manhattan as it began to transform its landscape into a 20th century skyline: an eruption of "modern flowers with veins of steel, bursting out of bedrock." It does not take a Viennese mind doctor to find eroticism in such charged imagery. Building cities is a procreative business, and Dressler is an evocative example of a breed driven to reproduce itself in concrete. A decision to marry a withdrawn woman of no discernible personality is a strong indication of his diverted passions.

In such respects Martin Dressler is an urban fable about civilization and its discontents, the repression of instincts in the service of progress. Yet this commercial hero also represents a period of social history when ambition and new wealth outstripped utility and taste. Dressler's Grand Cosmo, an architectural and cultural Tower of Babel, is part residence and part theme park. Within its 30 stories and two subterranean levels are a beach, a lake, a model New England village, a Moorish bazaar and a simulated asylum for the insane. Criticized as an example of "the worst excesses of late Victorian eclecticism," Dressler's folly fails spectacularly, a case of too much too late. In the end Dressler completes the illusion and his ruination by hiring actors to play customers.

Turning real estate into a reflection of a mind that in turn mirrors a society is a tricky literary feat. Millhauser pulls it off by lowering the barriers between realism and myth. The effect is also to remove artificial distinctions between the entrepreneur and the artist. Both, this well-told tale of obsession suggests, are gripped by demonic energies and grand schemes. And both take big risks, not the least of which is to be consumed by their own creations.

--By R.Z. Sheppard