Dayswork

August 1, 2023
An obsession with Herman Melville emerges amid pandemic lockdown. It's not immediately clear why the book opens with the narrator's husband saying to her: "Bon voyage." She calls it an "edict inside a valediction," suggesting that these are people who enjoy words and wordplay. And irony. For this is the time of the pandemic. The couple are academics stuck at home with their two daughters, but the narrator has embarked on a research project concerning Herman Melville. A desk-chair traveler, she roams through scholarship, criticism, fans' notes, and ephemera, presenting facts, coincidences, and insights in mostly short, one-sentence paragraphs that form a kind of enchiridion of Melvilleana, reflecting an obsession with Herman not unlike Ahab's with Moby. At the same time, the narrator sparingly provides glimpses of her home life and marriage, moments of domestic ease or of uncertainty, hints of past discord, like "the Bad Time." The narrator's Hermania should engage book lovers, as she collects and connects facts about Melville and references from his biographers and other writers--E.M. Forster, Walker Percy, William Gaddis, Marilynne Robinson, Lauren Groff et al.--in a way that points up the delights of literary trawling. Elizabeth Hardwick's short life of Melville and his marriage are tied to Hardwick's rocky union with Robert Lowell as well as Melville's intense friendship with Hawthorne. The toll that creativity can take on partnerships is a pervasive theme. The authors themselves are husband and wife. Bachelder was a National Book Award finalist for his 2016 novel, The Throwback Special. Habel won the Iowa Poetry Prize for her 2020 collection, The Book of Jane. Some autobiographical points are evident, but what may be more revealing is the tonal consistency of this collaboration and the sense of creative pleasure that went into making it. A remarkable, unusually rewarding work.

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Starred review from August 1, 2023
Married writers with a daughter cope with the pandemic lockdown. The woman, who narrates, embarks on a voyage through the vast ocean deep of Herman Melville scholarship, reporting her soundings in pithy and provocative paragraphs, creating a journal of an obsession and a log of a marriage and a household under pressure, a veritable domestic submarine. Witty and blithe for all its depth and lancing biographical facts, this montage shimmers with musings rueful, bemused, appalled, marveling, and poignant. Here are arresting insights into the magnificence of Moby-Dick, Melville's minefield temperament, and the sorrows, "misery and tyranny" in his household as his patient and brainy wife and sister navigated his "wretched handwriting" to make clean copies of his manuscripts. We follow the epic, absurd, and hilarious struggles of an overwhelmed Melville biographer; dip into Elizabeth Hardwick's book on Melville and her treacherous marriage to Robert Lowell; encounter Emily Dickinson; and plunge into the vagaries of digital research. Bachelder and Habel have created a curious, heady cocktail of a quarantine novel that feels like a buoyant literary memoir, a surprising and exhilarating inquiry into the pleasures and pitfalls of literature, obsession, collaboration, and love, all relayed with piquant wit and thrilling insight.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.