On the surface, Steven Millhauser's first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943–1954, and his most recent, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, appear radically different in subject and scope. Edwin Mullhouse—the outrageously exhaustive literary biography (written by an 11-year-old!) of a writer whose "Early," "Middle" and "Late" periods span kindergarten through fifth grade—counts the angels on the head of a pin. Martin Dressler, in contrast, constructs a grand cosmology (a vast, turn-of-the-century New York City hotel named—what else?—The Grand Cosmo) to rival Dante's road map of heaven and hell. But both Edwin Mullhouse's biography and Martin Dressler's hotel are really cities of the mind, archeologies of the imagination.

Steven Millhauser's previous novels include Little Kingdoms and The Barnum Museum. The re-publication of his 1972 novel, Edwin Mullhouse, in conjunction with the appearance of Martin Dressler, provides an opportunity to discover patterns that have shaped the writer's ongoing aspirations and inspirations from beginning to end.

Edwin Mullhouse is a hoot of a book. Not since Vladimir Nabokov set Dr. Charles Kinbote loose to wreak havoc on poet John Shade's heroic couplets in Pale Fire has there been a more deliciously loony literary critic than Jeffrey Cartwright, the "real" author of Edwin Mullhouse.

You have to suspend your disbelief a bit, of course, to enjoy this Bugsy Malone of literary biographies. The truly annoying Jeffrey Cartwright, detecting signs of genius in his friend Edwin since birth, decides at age 5 that he will play a pint-sized Boswell. (Edwin's first, infant memory of Jeffrey is, appropriately, "a vague sensation of someone bending too close to me"). Jeffrey, a young fellow with apparently total recall, faithfully catalogues the titles of Edwin's 200 favorite cartoons, provides an exhaustive summary of "juvenilia"—thirty-one stories from a family newspaper, "an event of major significance in the spiritual history of my artistic friend"—and records Edwin's every word. Edwin Mullhouse's literary career climaxes with his one and only book, Cartoons (published posthumously in 1958). Ironically, the writer's death makes possible the biographer's Life.

Is it any coincidence that Edwin Mullhouse, with its lambent prose, flights of speculative free association and novelistic probings, was originally published in the same year as the final tome of Leon Edel's five-volume, bazillion-page life of Henry James? But then, why pick on Edel? Scores of literary biographers could be models for Millhauser's dead-on satire of the form.

Shrunk to the scale of Edwin Mullhouse's brief life span, childhood events loom large as defining moments: At 6 months, we learn, "Edwin was always sleeping"; "colds always took him by surprise"; "third grade surprised me: I had not anticipated desks." When a cohort hits the skids, "she drifted into the middle reading group and at last into the lowest reading group, from which she never emerged."

A big joke, of course (one Jeffrey shares with Kinbote) is that this unreliable narrator/biographer has no idea how deluded he is. Jeffrey's unctuous self-effacement is hollow to the core: "It has been my policy in this work to huddle modestly in the background." Who's the biographer really writing about? Why, himself, of course: "I, for one, can testify that even a modest biographer can be driven to strange devices for the sake of his throbbing book."

The even bigger joke, though—one it may take the reader longer to figure out—is the fact that Jeffrey Cartwright is correct: Edwin Mullhouse is a genius. And so is Jeffrey Cartwright (Steven Millhauser, too).

"Biography is so simple…. All you do is put in everything," says Edwin. And that's just what Jeffrey does, with mad abandon. There are wonderful pages on the poetry of Edwin's pre-verbal burbles (James Joyce meets Mister Rogers), and the miracle that happens in first grade: "Words were springing up all around him…. They grew on pencils, on lamps, on clocks, on paper bags, on cardboard boxes, on carpet sweepers, on the brass prongs of all plugs, on the bottom of plates, on the backs of spoons. They grew on his sneakers, in his underpants, on the inside of his shirt behind his neck."

"For what is genius," Millhauser writes, "but the capacity to be obsessed? Every normal child has that capacity … but sooner or later it is beaten out of us, the glory faded." What if, contrary to the Wordsworthian dictum that we must inexorably trade the heaven which "lies about us in our infancy" for the "light of common day," we could fully recall the wondrous way we saw the world as a child?

That's the imaginative premise of Edwin Mullhouse—and the grim joke behind Edwin's early death, which saves him from "the obscenity of maturity." It's also a clue to the main character's name, that seductive echo between "Edwin Mullhouse" and "Steven Millhauser." Not to wax biographical (pace, Jeffrey Cartwright!), but surely Mullhouse is Millhauser's childhood self—just as Cartwright is a darkly comic parody of the adult writer, shaping childhood memories to the procrustean bed of literary form.

Like Edwin Mullhouse, Millhauser's new novel, Martin Dressler, is a story of genius and obsession, in which an amazing world is built to the dictates of an unfettered imagination. It's a tale as American as a Horatio Alger. A German immigrant lad in New York City at the turn of the century rises from rolling cigars in his father's store to outtrumping The Donald as the builder of the most astounding hotels the world has ever seen.

At age 13, Martin takes the Prospect Park & Coney Island Railroad to West Brighton, where he has a transforming vision of the modern age: "Iron piers stretched out over the ocean, iron towers pierced the sky, somewhere under the water a great telegraph cable longer than the longest train stretched … and Martin had the odd sensation … that the world, immense and extravagant, was rushing away in every direction." The rest of the novel (which takes place between 1881 and 1905) chronicles Dressler's attempts to harness and contain that pulsing energy in a series of ever-grander business and building enterprises.

As a youth, Dressler wanders the "vast stretch of land" between the Hudson River and Central Park, a patchwork of row houses, vacant lots, chateaux, squatters' shacks and farms. As the city grows, so does Dressler's imagination: "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."

Historic New York has been the focus of popular novels from the nostalgic (Jack Finney's Time and Again) to the nasty (Caleb Carr's The Alienist). Martin Dressler's Manhattan joins the fantastic ranks of meta-cities as a worthy companion to Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale and E. L. Doctorow's The Waterworks. If you're a fan of the time-travel genre, you'll relish the vivid detail with which Millhauser re-creates a bygone era: a flash of high-seated cyclists, distant sounds of an organ grinder, the smell of horse manure in the air. In contrast to the Joycean excess of Edwin Mullhouse, Martin Dressler's prose is spare, but still sensuous, as rich as a Tiffany lampshade "hand-painted with Nile-green sailboats, its gleam of slender glasses holding amber and emerald and ruby liquids."

Martin Dressler's astounding success comes from his uncanny ability to intuit the temper of an era still in its infancy. His restaurants flourish on prescient principles: relentless print advertising, linked stores with similar decor, name recognition, "five-minute" breakfasts (guaranteed), free prizes for the kids. Not content to invent the McDonald's of the horse and buggy set, however, he restlessly seeks out evermore difficult and daring endeavors. Dressler rises inexorably from desk clerk at the Vanderlyn Hotel to developer of a chain of "Metropolitan Lunchrooms" to innovator of the grandest of grand hotels.

In the hotel business, Martin Dressler finds his true métier. An epiphany sets the tone for the fantastical ventures that follow: "At once he saw: deep under the earth, in darkness impenetrable, an immense dynamo was humming … 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 … a wild, sweet exhilaration." The self-contained universe of the hotel will literally body forth its creator's imagination.

I can't help but think of Martin Dressler's contemporary, Henry Adams, speculating in his Education that "the new American—the child of incalculable coal-power, chemical power, electric power, and radiating energy, as well as of new forces yet undetermined—must be a sort of God."

Just as Jeffrey Cartwright "creates" Edwin Mullhouse, so Martin Dressler realizes American dreams in concrete and steel. The apex of his creation, the Grand Cosmo itself, is an amalgam of hotel, museum, department store, amusement park and theater—twenty-three levels underground, thirty above—containing (and I offer only the most partial of lists): rustic cottages, caves, a New England Village, a Moorish Bazaar, a Seance Parlor, a Temple of Poesy, an Asylum for the Insane, a Theatrum Mundi, stage sets of the solar system and "black gardens of imagination" in a subterranean labyrinth. Millhauser's powers of description in this section of the book astound and delight.

The Grand Cosmo cleverly embodies the most profound contradictions of the modern American sensibility: our yearning for the nostalgic and the new, the exotic and the utterly familiar; a place at the very heart of the city—and a place where we can get away from it all. (I write this review a stone's throw from the Mall of America, that Grand Cosmo of the Upper Midwest!)

Yet Martin Dressler, man of his age with the Midas touch, builds the Grand Cosmo to his heart's desire—and it fails miserably. Why? Is Dressler being punished by a jealous God for satanic overreaching? Is there a fatal flaw in this creator that leads to the downfall of his creation? One clue may be found in his disastrous marriage. Dreams make terrible lovers, as he discovers after wedding the languorous beauty Caroline Vernon, a woman whose lotus-eating sensibility ("a sweet, melting melancholy, a dissolving shadowy sweetness of vague regret and dim longing") would seem at utter odds with Martin's go-getting ambition. His ill-fated attraction to Caroline suggests the darker proclivities of an obsessive imagination: Vigorous cities of the mind can also become entropic, escapist prisons.

Another clue to the fate of the Grand Cosmo can be found near the novel's end. Martin strolls the streets of his old neighborhood to discover that his first residence, the Bellingham Hotel, has vanished without a trace: "That was the way of things in New York…. 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." Millhauser here takes a page from Prospero's book: "The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces … the great globe itself" must inevitably dissolve as we awake from artifice to reality.

But I doubt Steven Millhauser is about to abjure his rough magic just yet. Edwin Mullhouse ends with Jeffrey bumping into yet another "interesting little fellow … I expect to be seeing more of … in the near future." At the conclusion of Martin Dressler, its hero ambles away from his failed hotel into the light of common day: "For the time being he would just walk along, keeping a little out of the way of things, admiring the view…. He was in no hurry." The year is 1905; Martin Dressler, the suggestive age of 33. I eagerly await another biography, another hotel, another novel.