> Summer Read with Beth
> Setting: New York City, late 1800s, massive construction occurring
> Characters: Martin (the shopkeeper's son with a dream), Caroline (wife, idealized yet empty, symbol of the dream, haunting, elusive), Emmeline (Caroline's sister, Martin's right hand, symbol of the real), Marie Haskova (the Ukrainian maid who had sex with Martin on his wedding night, symbol of the past?), Harwinton (the advertising man...ascribing meaning to the meaningless), Rudolf Arling ( daring designer always pushing the edge, Martin liked his edginess)
> p.1..."This was toward the end of the nineteenth century, when on any streetcorner in America you might see some ordinary-looking citizen who was destined to invent a new kind of bottlecap or tin can, start a chain of five-cent stores, sell a faster and better elevator, or open a fabulous new department store with big display windows made possible by an improved process for manufacturing sheets of glass....."
> p.24..." He admired the hotel as an invention, an ingenious design, a kind of idea, like a steam boiler or a suspension bridge."
> p.59..."Then the dream-feeling would come over him, as if his real life were not here, where it seemed to be, but over there, a little off to one side, just over there."
> p.60..."As he walked, looking about, taking it all in, feeling a pleasant tension in his calves and thighs, he felt a surge of energy a kind of serene restlessness, a desire to do something, to test himself, to become, in some way, larger than he was."
> p.65..."He felt a kind of inner straining at the leash, an almost physical desire to pour out his energy without constraint."
> p. 79..."For it was interesting, it was a subject that never ceased to fascinate him, how the two worlds existed together, the world of oil lamps and incandescent lights, of horsecars and steam trains, one world gradually crowding out the other."
> p.129..."...he felt, even as he turned over the idea of a fourth cafe in Brooklyn, a little sharp burst of restlessness, of dissatisfaction, as if he were supposed to be doing something else, something grander, higher, more difficult, more dangerous, more daring."
> p.167..."It was a world in which he could feel his senses waking even as he walked in cold dawns to the iron stairs of the El, a hard sharp exhilarating world--an Emmeline-world, as he had come to think of it, bright and flashing, charged with energy
> p. 173.."And at once he saw: deep under the earth, in darkness impenetrable, an immense dynamo was humming."
> p.174..."...and then it was as if the structure were his own body, his head piercing the clouds, his feet buried deep in the earth, and in his blood the plunge and rise of elevators."
> p.179..."Far from deploring such contradictions, Martin felt deeply drawn to them, as if they permitted people to live in two worlds at once, a new world of steel and dynamos and an older world of stone arches and hand-carved wood."
> p.181..."The department store and the hotel were little cities within the city, but they were also experimental cities, cities in advance of the city, for they represented in different forms the thrust toward vertical community that seemed to Martin the great fact of the modern city."
> p.194..."But far more than this it was an age of inner or enclosed eclecticism, by which he meant not the familiar combination of antiquated styles with modern technological devices like elevators and telephones, but rather the tendency of modern structures to embrace and enclose as many different elements as possible."
> p.204..."As Harwinton put it, his eyes were opened; advertising was a science, a system of measurable strategies for awaking and securing the attention of buyers."
> p.205.."But as an advertiser, I train myself to experience the world as an immense blankness. It's my job to provide that blankness with meaning."
> p.234..."Sometimes he seemed to hear, all up and down the West End, a great ripping or breaking, as bedrock split open to give birth to buildings."
> p.234..."It was as if the West End had been raked over by a gigantic harrow and planted with seeds of steel and stone; now as the century turned, the avenues had begun to erupt in strange, immense growths; modern flowers with veins of steel, bursting out of bedrock."
> p.235.."His own dream was to push the New Dressler beyond the limits of the old, to express in a single building what the city was expressing separately in its hotels and skyscrapers and department stores; and again he had the old dream-sense that friendly powers were leading him along, powers sympathetic to his deepest desires."....a tad Messianic if you ask me!
> p.240..."The writer criticized the New Dressler as a hybrid for, a transitional form, in which the hotel had begun to lose its defining characteristics without having successfully evolved into something else....". The dilemma the USA has now as well?
> p.243..."And it seemed to Martin that if only he could imagine something else, something great, something greater, something as great as the whole world, then he might rest awhile.".....desire to be Godlike
> p.259..."It pleased him that the city was going underground, that even as it strained higher and higher it was smashing its way through avenues and burrowing through blackness......"...the manner in which humanity is consuming the earth and its environment?
> p.260..."The Bellingham had simply vanished. That was the way of things in New York: they were there one day and gone the next. Even as his new building rose story by story it was already vanishing, the trajectory of the wrecker's ball had been set in motion as the blade of the first bulldozer bit into the earth."
> p.263..."...as an advertising man he saw the world as a great blankness, a collection of meaningless signs into which he breathed meaning. Then you might say that Harwinton was Go0d. That would explain why he never grew old. The thought interested Martin: he was having a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee with the Lord God, King of the Universe, a youthful American god with light blue eyes and blond lashes."
> p.275..."There was thus a paradoxical sense in which the minutiae of the building were expressions of the architect's obsession with the gigantic, and a corresponding sense in which the sheer immensity of the structure was an expression of a miniaturist's tendency toward obsessive elaboration. Both sense betrayed a yearning for the exhaustive, which was the secret malady of the age."
> p.281..."Did the public, along with its craving for the up-to-date and the brand-new, also crave not simply the familiar, but the repetitive, the reassuring sense of boredom provided by multiple sameness?"
> p.281..."Or was he peing punished for something deeper than crime, for a desire, a forbidden desire, the desire to create the world? For of course only God and Harwinton could do that. Anyone else was bound to fail."
> p.288..."The Grand Cosmo would soon pass away, even now it was fading, becoming dreamlike as he watched. Already he could hear it falling, falling like white snow. The three women were a sign, demon-women summoned up from deepest dream. Fa a building was a dream, a dream made stone, the dream lurking in the stone so that the stone wasn't stone only but dream, more dream than stone, dream-stone and dream-steel, forever unlasting. Friendly powers had led him along dark paths of dream......"
> p.293..."For the time being he would just walk along, keeping a little out of the way of things, admiring the view. It was a warm day. He was in no hurry." He is waking from the dream as the story ends
> LibraryThing Review: This Pulitzer Prize winning novel is deceptively simplistic. The tale of a dreamer and the American Dream, the story builds consistently to what may be considered a predictable ending. However, the final trajectory of the story was reminiscent of "Atlas Shrugged" in its stunning and thought provoking conclusion.
The themes in the novel include: dream v. reality and the ability to become lost in either of them, creativity, ambition, the American Dream v. the American dreamer, the trajectory of New York City in the late 1800s. Excellent read!
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