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Title details for Dayswork by Chris Bachelder - Available

Dayswork

A Novel

by Chris Bachelder
Jennifer Habel
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 1 copy available
A startlingly original, incantatory novel about marriage, mortality, and making art. In the endless days of the pandemic, a woman spends her time sorting fact from fiction in the life and work of Herman Melville. As she delves into Melville's impulsive purchase of a Massachusetts farmhouse, his fevered revision of Moby-Dick there, his intense friendship with neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his troubled and troubling marriage to Elizabeth Shaw, she becomes increasingly obsessed by what his devotion to his art reveals about cost, worth, and debt. Her preoccupation both deepens and expands, and her days' work extends outward to an orbiting cast of Melvillean questers and fanatics, as well as to biographers and writers-among them Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell-whose lives resonate with Melville's. As she pulls these distant figures close, her quarantine quest ultimately becomes a midlife reckoning with her own marriage and ambition. Absorbing, charming, and intimate, Dayswork considers the blurry lines between life and literature, the slippage between what happens and what gets recorded, and the ways we locate ourselves in the lives of others. In wry, epigrammatic prose, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel have crafted an exquisite and daring novel.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 5, 2023

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781696613149
      • File size: 171810 KB
      • Duration: 05:57:56

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      June 10, 2024

      Struggling under the weight of the pandemic lockdown, a woman attempts to separate fact from fiction in the life of writer Herman Melville. From Melville's deep friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne to his troubling marriage with Elizabeth Shaw, the narrator paints a portrait of a man obsessed with art while debt and questions of his own worth loomed large. As the woman's research into Melville and those around him deepens, she comes to reckon with her own marriage and midlife crisis. Spouses Bachelder (The Throwback Special) and Habel (The Book of Jane) join forces for this intensely focused and arresting novel, which Janet Metzger narrates. Metzger capably describes the protagonist's scholarly journey, conveying the sense of a time and place removed. While the pandemic wreaks havoc in the outer world, in the woman's contained universe her husband builds birdhouses, and she descends into a rabbit hole of her own making. Unfortunately, though Metzger's performance is strong, the novel, which is marked by meandering sentences and features copious lists, quickly becomes tedious in audio. VERDICT Listeners may be intrigued by this creative exploration of Herman Melville, but the content might be better experienced in print.--Elyssa Everling

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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