There are a number of significant literary precedents for Millhauser's work. Critics and reviewers often point out Millhauser's similarity to Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka; and, indeed, there is an important similarity here. All three authors make use of the tropes and narrative styles offered by folktales, fairy tales and myths in order to tell very modern stories about very modern social, political, and psychological dilemmas. The magical hotels Martin builds owe more than a little to fictional structures such as Kafka's "Great Wall of China" and Borges's "Library of Babel." But if Millhauser's work owes its stylistic and philosophical debts to Borges and Kafka, it borrows its subject matter wholesale from Horatio Alger.

In novels such as Struggling Upward, The Store Boy, and Ragged Dick, Alger offered tales of boys much like Martin Dressier to a voracious reading public. Millhauser is self-consciously appropriating the...