A few quick thoughts on this, a Pulitzer Prize winner, before I jump into the next in the queue. First, before you look away, it's solidly recommended by this reader. Somehow I slipped into reading this without knowing much beyond the keywords -- New York, ambition, hotels, turn-of-the-century -- and you'd do well to not dwell on the specifics much if you're thinking of picking it up. Not that there is much to spoil, but it makes sense to propel yourself into it while hungry, so you can lap up the short early chapters in one sitting.
I will say only this about the writing: it creates detailed images while rarely feeling ornate. Surprising is its motion through time, a bit like a home video played for guests and a bit like a subway train: long stretches of minor importance covered in fast-forward, steamrolling into stations where the story pivots at brief moments of lingering, pausing to extend their stay. To mix metaphors.
It seems disproportionately critical to say the book morphs itself along the way; the feeling you are left with at its end is hardly the feelings brought forth throughout. It is not uneven. Perhaps it matures. Of course, for a character whose excited efforts in the heat of ambition are at odds with the restlessness and apathy of a job completed, this seems appropriate. Which is to say there is little conflict in these pages, except in the tension between expectation and result.
I don't know, though. Finding it hard to speak directly about this book, although I am sure it is rich and worth your time. Dreams are important in Martin Dressler, although not at all in the way they tend to be. They are waking dreams, creeping diversions from the present state of things rather than contained realities. Which explains these dazed paragraphs, I think.
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