SOURCE: "Heartbreak Hotel," in The New York Times Book Review, May 12, 1996, p. 8.

[In the following review, Burroway favorably assesses Martin Dressler.]

"Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate to our dreams." So says the narrator of Steven Millhauser's story "Eisenheim the Illusionist," and that claim, might stand as an epigraph to his new conjuring trick of a novel, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer.

This wonderful, wonder-full book is a fable and phantasmagoria of the sources of our century "There once lived a man named Martin Dressler, a shopkeeper's son, who rose from modest beginnings to a height of dreamlike good fortune … But this is a perilous privilege, which the gods watch jealously." "Perilous privilege" is the core of Mr. Millhauser's analysis of that subgenre of fairy tale, the American Dream.

The setting is late-19th-century New York, a place where, like...