It doesn't take too much digging to get under The American Dream and discover that it can be selfish and hurtful to anyone caught in the wake of someone chasing it. In this Pulitzer Prize winning story, young Martin Dressler works his way up from shop worker to business magnate, losing his perpetually tenuous personal connections along the way.
Author Steven Millhauser's cautionary story has been told before, and it's tempting to look back thirty years and think how quant it is that people weren't already aware of how personally brutal a focus on business prosperity can be. But, of course, they knew that in 1996, too.
Dressler's big dreams are in business real estate, building bigger and grander shopping centres and dreaming of building a micro-city with a place to live, work, and shop, all within an expanse of his design. His business dreams never come true, and in the midst of chasing those dreams he loses connections to his wife, Caroline, and her sister Emmaline (to whom Dressler was spiritually closer).
The American Dream, however, survives, because it will seemingly always survive the failure of one of its chasers since there are untold more about to commence their own chase.
In the end, I'd say that while this isn't a tale previously untold, but it's a tell well-told and worth telling (and re-telling again).
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