The rise of a plutocrat

Inherited wealth is always attractive, particularly should it include majestic ancestral homes, but it is never really quite as interesting as the loot acquired by struggle and hard graft. The non-criminal climb from the gutter to the penthouse not only provides good copy, it inspires and highlights the differences between the lazy and the determined and proves greed alone is never enough. In the case of Steven Millhauser's Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (Phoenix House, £12.99 in UK), the riches are sought not for their own sake but merely as steps to the fulfilment of increasingly fabulous, ultimately surreal schemes.

Each commercial successes immediately bores Martin Dressler and leaves him anxious to attempt another, bigger, more daring dream. Unlike Gatsby, Martin is not even driven by romantic desires nor by the force of his ego. His remarkable career in late19th-century New York evolves as a fairy tale which cleverly, if predictably, becomes a morality play. Above all - and it is this which confers near-greatness on this singular novel - Millhauser's story, which seems essentially American, is in fact curiously European.

Our hero is the son of an immigrant shopkeeper father. Dressler senior is a cigar maker. While still a boy, Martin displays signs of entrepreneurial zeal. He decides his father's display window looks dull and so sets out to improve it by creating a cigar tree made of wire. "He gave a final bend to one wire branch, moved the tree slightly back so it stood behind and between two open cigar boxes, and stepped down from the window. The he opened the door and walked out under the awning . . . Martin saw instantly that the cigar tree in the window was wrong: it looked funny and spindly, hardly like a tree at all - it gave off an air of poverty, of failure. It was stupid and ugly." At this moment, Millhauser offers an extraordinary clue to what it to follow: "disappointment flamed" in Martin, but his face, reflected in the shop window, looked "thoughtful and calm".

A job as a bell hop at in a big hotel quickly opens his eyes to a self-contained world existing behind the bustle of the streets outside. The stage is set for a dramatic rise to the top, this is largely what happens. However, while his career route is straightforward, the man himself is almost robotic and utterly devoid of the manic energy expected of financial wizards. He doesn't strive, hunger, or yearn very loudly; his story is oddly quiet and well-mannered, considering his rise is taking place in a New York likened to "a fever-patient in a hospital, thrashing in its sleep, erupting in modern dreams".

Millhauser was awarded last year's Pulitzer Prize for this strange, cautionary book. The prize is significant, not only as recognition of a quiet, insistent and bizarre book but also as a wider acknowledgment of Mill hauser, author of Little Kingdoms, The Barnum Museum and Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, whose fame until now has largely been confined to a cult following.

Quickly, too quickly, Martin is on his way. He opens lunch rooms and eating houses open while still working at the hotel. About this time he meets the Vernons, a widow and her two grown daughters. The sisters have little in common; Caroline the blonde beauty is dull and barely alive, while Emmeline is dark, alert, intelligent and obviously more than a match for Martin. In a narrative rife with images and metaphors, the girls are variations of the sets of sisters found in fairy tales.

Characteristically, Martin simply drifts into an association with the Vernons, and is soon their constant dinner companion and, inevitably, Caroline's suitor, then fiance and eventually husband - all while he is establishing a partnership with Emmeline. When he is summoned to repair the faulty radiator in Caroline's room, Martin asks of Emmeline: "You don't happen to have a block of wood or a brick?" Her response is characteristically sharp: "I might have one in my purse." Martin of course, misses the irony; "he looked at her with surprise before it struck him that she had said something amusing."

Martin remains restless and disengaged; he has no emotional life, only dark sexual urges and confusions. Meanwhile his plans are becoming bigger and more fantastical. When he decides to build his own hotel it is obvious he is not going to be satisfied with evoking a sense of a world within a world: it will be a world. In one of his few personal comments, Martin remarks to Emmeline of his need for fresh air: "I couldn't breathe any more in the cafe business." The irony here is that the bizarre worlds he creates, hotels with woodlands and jungles and gardens and underground night skies, are sinisterly oppressive. As his hotels become larger and more fantastical, they also become more claustrophobic. Nothing is going to satisfy Martin.

Just as Dressler becomes alienated from his few friends - eventually losing his confidante Emmeline, while Caroline withdraws into her inner world - Millhauser's imagination and prose expand. His images are drawn from the real world - the furniture of hotels, museums, department stores, those worlds-within-worlds. There are echoes of J.G. Ballard here, though Ballard's images have always been futuristic. Millhauser defers to the history of a fledging New York. He allows Martin's coolly crazed visions to reach skywards with the skyscrapers as well as delving towards the underworld of subways and tunnels under the sidewalks. "You dug into the ground and made a hole, and from that hole a building grew - or a wondrous bridge."

By the end of the novel, Martin himself has become irrelevant as Millhauser's fantastic buildings, with their extraordinary catalogue of contents, take over. With the construction of the Grand Cosmos hotel, Martin appears to be challenging the world itself. This last hotel offers a Garden of Black Delights which boasts "monstrous jet-black blossoms" exuding "dangerous perfumes". Millhauser's quiet, understated prose balances the grotesque extremes of an imaginative novel belonging most emphatically in the worlds of Calvino and Borges. If the moral of the folly of huge ambitions is very obvious, Millhauser's calm evocation of the unnatural scale of Martin's dreams and their detailed descriptions is original and inventive, in a curious novel which manages to be hallucinatory as well as suffocatingly oppressive.