Ahab's Wife, Or The Star-Gazer (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
I must thank Louis Bayard for mentioning this book in an interview. I might not yet have read it if it weren't for him - and I am most appreciative. What an amazing book! I do feel inclined to return to Moby Dick once more, and this time to read it through. This book is complete even if Melville's novel never existed. But how cleverly Naslund makes connections to Melville's story, without repeating in any way what Melville told.Una is an outstanding character. I savored this book because of her. I would like to know a person like her, to be friends with a person like her.Nasland does a superb job of portraying the times - the abolitionist movement and the rumblings of war, the draw of the the frontier, the intellects, scientists and artists of the day, the importance of whaling as an industry, the life of families in a whaling town. Naslund uses Una to reflect upon all these as well as individual spiritual and moral questions that are still being debated today.One of Una's friends writes to her: "And it is the way of women. We allow each other our individuality. We do not insist that we dominate or control." That may have been more true in the 19th century, but even then there could be found many examples to the contrary.Nature, especially the sea, is a central motif throughout the novel. A close friend and neighbor of Una's - an artist - asked: "And wherein differ the sea and land?"He responds to his own rhetoric: "Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life.....Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return."This may be a book a decide to own (the copy I read is from the library), if just for the picture on the cover - "Reflections upon a Wreck at 'Sconset, Nantucket, Mass" by Baldwin Coolidge. P.S. I am too impulsive. I just ordered a copy of a book - New England Views: The Photography of Baldwin Coolidge. This received some excellent reviews and is out of print. It is not available from my library, alas.I need to go back to Nantucket, and to Bedford. There is so little time, alas.And now for the New York Times book review of October 3, 1999 by Stacey D'Erasmo. Based on her review below, she is a writer I want to know more of. So she goes on my reading list. HOW one feels about this book depends on how seriously one takes the pursuit of happiness -- as opposed to, say, the pursuit of a large white whale. In ''Ahab's Wife,'' Sena Jeter Naslund has taken less than a paragraph's worth of references to the captain's young wife from Herman Melville's ''Moby-Dick'' and fashioned from this slender rib not only a woman but an entire world. That world is a looking-glass version of Melville's fictional seafaring one, ruled by compassion as the other is by obsession, with a heroine who is as much a believer in social justice as the famous hero is in vengeance.Naslund, Ahab-like, has taken on an overwhelming quarry in pursuing Melville, but, true to her maternal, liberal philosophy, she does not harpoon the master so much as harness his force to her own. That Naslund is unstintingly reasonable, empathetic and kind should not, however, blind one to the fact that she is, in the most nonaggressive way, rewriting American history, revising American literature and critiquing traditional masculinity. On the froth and foam and rage of ''Moby-Dick'' Naslund lays a cool hand, as if to say: ''There, there. Such a fuss about a fish.''Melville probably would have found Naslund's inversion of his work anathema: not only did he basically exclude women from the decks of his fiction, he could barely tolerate the thought of them reading his books. Of ''Moby-Dick'' he wrote to a female acquaintance, ''Don't you buy it -- don't you read it when it does come out, because it is by no means a sort of book for you.'' In ''The Feminization of American Culture,'' Ann Douglas called ''Moby-Dick'' ''an implicit critique of liberal Protestantism,'' its intense masculinity and Calvinist perspective specifically designed to torpedo the popular and sentimental feminine works of the time. The book failed (it wasn't taken seriously until many years after Melville's death). Ironically, ''Ahab's Wife,'' which reworks the great whaling novel from a female, liberal, Protestant point of view, is already positioned to be a best seller. A Book-of-the-Month Club main selection, with a huge first printing, it may well turn out to be Melville's worst nightmare: ''Moby-Dick'' rewritten by a woman as a conventionally constructed popular novel with an unflaggingly virtuous heroine and a happy ending.''Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last,'' begins Naslund's heroine, Una Spenser, as she lies on her back on a Nantucket beach after Ahab's death, watching the clouds go by. One of them, she thinks, looks a bit like Ahab's face, a face that she always recalls as ''mild'' if somewhat excitable. She waves goodbye. With one dreamy, casual gesture, Una thus waves aside a century's worth of canonization and goes on to talk about what's really on her mind: her mother. Over the course of the next 667 pages, Una unscrolls her life story, a long and winding tale in which Ahab is one player among many, and not necessarily the most important one.The woman who was of so little interest to Melville and his creation that they could barely spare her 10 sentences reveals, in her turn, that Ahab constituted a fraction of her own adventures. Moreover, the captain was, as she knew him, a pretty decent older guy -- forward-thinking, a proto-feminist and good in bed -- until his violent encounter with the mysterious underwater mammal induced in him a condition that today could probably be solved with a prescription for Viagra. Unfortunately, he took another route, and the rest is history.Her history was different. In quite beautiful, unobtrusively 19th-century-style prose, divided into many little Melvillean chapters, Una tells of how her good mother sent her away from her zealously religious, violent father to be reared by liberal lighthouse keepers; how, at 16, she left them to run off to sea disguised as a boy (named Ulysses); how she was shipwrecked and ate human flesh to survive; how she loved two men, married one of them, but later lost them both; how she married Ahab, had a child with him, but lost both of them as well; how she loved again, had another child, whom she named Justice, and became part of a community of freethinkers on Nantucket, where she discovered her truest happiness.Along the way, Naslund thoroughly feminizes the masculine sense of epic, right down to its tropes: the mind is ''a glistening, pink cave''; the head of a whale surfaces in the water ''the way the tip of a needle broke through fabric.'' The first time Una sees Ahab, through a spyglass, she says that she ''inscribed'' him, in an antique usage of that verb that reverberates with the act of writing itself: she writes him, or rewrites him. The old sailor, in her reasonable gaze, is just another man in a boat. The killing of whales, Naslund makes clear, was a misbegotten enterprise that drove men mad by setting them to dominate a vast Otherness that could not be dominated; it was a kind of barbarous war.Ishmael, after he washes up on shore and meets Una at a party, speculates that men who kill whales, the sea's ''great, oil-saturated'' babies, show that they ''hate the oceanic mother.'' It's not nice to fool with Mother Nature -- whale-killers, in this novel, come to bad ends. Una, by contrast, says of the ''heartless immensities'' that ''we are a part of them, and they are a part of us,'' and lives happily ever after: progressive virtue is rewarded.Naslund, the author of four previous books of fiction, is most successful here sentence to sentence, where her gift for pleasure shines. Her Una is a deep and wayward creature, undaunted by convention, whose descriptions are dense with a languid and sensual interest in the world. Unlike Ahab, Una can wait. She is not driven; for her, the world is enough. Somewhat more problematic is the extent to which that world is strewn with benevolence toward her. Ahab thinks of her as his daughter; at a bookstall she bumps into Margaret Fuller, who promptly invites her to her salon; a kindly Nantucket townswoman offers to share with Una her collection of porcelain dildos when Ahab is away. There are quite a number of Unitarians, and a family of fondue-eating pacifists. After the departure of the first, cruel father, the book positively abounds in good father figures, including, in a way, Melville himself: from his few meager crumbs of concern for what Ahab left behind on land, Naslund has baked an enormous, many-layered cake, and fed it all to her protagonist.IN this respect, ''Ahab's Wife'' is sometimes reminiscent of a Marge Piercy or Marilyn French novel, circa 1976, minus any anger. Una is an innate feminist, but she is inscribed into a landscape that rarely opposes or disappoints her for long. Instead, she wins again and again, the narrative kindly correcting every social inequity in her favor, as well as that of other like-minded characters. In this America, liberals rule. On the roiling, dark terrain of Melville's wildness and disintegration, Naslund has erected a glistening pink utopia, every word of which argues by harmonious example, ''Now, isn't this better?''And, of course, it is, though when one gets to the scene of a more or less uncloseted gay male character teaching newly freed slaves to make pots by the seaside, one might well feel that wish fulfillment has trumped artistic good sense. It is certainly no accident that when Una has a daughter, she names the child Felicity. The book insists on happiness, sometimes to the exclusion of even the most generous reading of history. But why not? Men have got rich from their big harpoons and mythic beasts and improbable heroics. Don't women deserve their own fantastic voyages?
A Ship is a Breath of RomanceThat Carries Us Miles Away.And a Book is a Ship of FancyThat Could Sail on Any DayThere you have it. This is why books are better than ships. Well, maybe not this book...Almost nine months ago, my book club picked this one as the February read, so I had plenty of time to read it. And I had the best intentions. I ordered a used copy last October, a nice first-edition hardback, heavy as any doorstop. I glanced at it and put it in my stack. Plenty of time to read it, no hurry. Other books got piled on top, and well, you know how it is... I thought about starting it a few times. Somehow, it's like I knew it was going to be a "Meh!" read for me. Finally, a scant nine days before the club meeting, I started reading.There's a WHAM! BANG! beginning, with a riveting birth scene attended by a runaway slave. Then we hop back in time til when young Una , after being threatened physically by her maniacally religious father, is sent to live in a lighthouse with her aunt, uncle and lovable young cousin. One day, two potential love interests arrive to install a newfangled Fresnel lens. Hmm....will she choose the chatty one who seems smitten with her, or the dark, brooding mysterious one?And then, after something bad happens, she cuts her hair and signs aboard a whaling ship as a cabin boy. (I swear, I could almost hear Streisand singing "Papa, Can You Hear Me?") What follows are pages and pages of blood, guts, blubber, tragedy, disaster and death. Una and one of her beaus end up on the Pequod, where there is more blood and blubber, and now some madness thrown into the mix, as well. Rather disturbingly, I thought, Una, still in her teens, ends up married to Ahab, a man in his fifties. More bad stuff happens, with a brief time out for tea parties, and some china and linen shopping.Then the book kind of descends into a Forrest Gumpian fantasy where if anyone important was alive at the time and hanging about Nantucket, Una manages to meet them. (I'm surprised to find she didn't somehow serve as the model for the Statue of Liberty.)I didn't HATE this book, and it is NOT terrible. Much of it was well written, and I really enjoyed a few of the MANY storylines. The women in my book club loved it enough to pick it a SECOND time, even though most of them had already read and discussed it in 2001.I just couldn't help wishing that Una had said, "Screw you, Ahab, you old fart!" and taken off with the runaway slave instead. Oh, and she should have definitely had a roll in the hay with the dwarf bounty hunter.
What do You think about Ahab's Wife, Or The Star-Gazer (2005)?
“Captain Ahab was not my first husband nor my last.”Oh come on. Of course I had to quote the first line.This book is derived from a single, glancing reference in Moby-Dick to the beautiful young woman Captain Ahab has married. This is Una Spencer’s story, in her own words. The book is massive, complex, written as a companion, a tribute, an argument, a twentieth-century female response to a nineteenth-century male book. It’s couched in the Moby-Dick style, from the choppy chapters to the capital R Romantic school of writing and its dedication to individual power in the face of society, to natural ideals, to characters who are both individuals and avatars.As derivative fiction, this is brilliant. From that first sentence, this book plants its feet solidly bestride the old classic and takes a broader view from a new height. Una’s story encompasses Ahab’s and surpasses it; it must to draw a complete portrait of the unusual woman who would capture driven Ahab’s love. Obviously, I find fanfiction on this scale absolutely delightful.I admire the hell out of this book: the scope, the layered, image-saturated prose, the philosophy and the art of it. And Una is a powerful narrator and person – agnostic, abolitionist, thinker, mother, sailor, seamstress, lover. She dresses as a boy and goes to sea, and finds herself in the path of a number of famous people like Margaret Fuller and Maria Mitchell and, glancingly, Henry James. It’s a broad and faithful portrait of the times and of the style, but laying some of it out here, perhaps you see the problem. I feel as if this is sometimes a book before it is a story, if that makes sense. Una is extraordinary in ways that, yes, some women of the 1840’s probably were, but this book is as much about holding up the prism of Una against the nineteenth century as it is about holding her up for her own sake. But I can’t really put the teeth into this to make it criticism, because even it is faithful to the style, and Naslund is absolutely deliberate and controlled in what she is doing:"In the quest of writing, the heart can speed up with anticipation as, indeed, during the very chase of whales. I can swear it, having done both, and I will tell you though other writers may not. My heart is beating fast. I am in pursuit, I want my victory that you should see and hear and, above all, feel the reality behind these words. For they are but a mask. The mask that conceals, not a mask that I would have you strike through as mere appearance or worse, deceitful appearance. Words need not be that kind of mask, but a mask such as the ancient Greek actors wore. A mask that expresses rather than conceals the inner drama. But do you know me? Una? You have shipped long with me in the boat that is this book."I do think that this book can stand alone, both from Moby-Dick and from literary and social history, though maybe not as much as the author wishes. But knowledge of both adds and explains a whole lot – I rather suspect that the casual reader, who did not know that Moby-Dick was dedicated to Melville’s good friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, would find Una’s encounter with a strange veiled man on her walk to see her friend Margaret Fuller nearly inexplicable. This book puts the literary back in literary fiction, and I think it would be helped a great deal by a proper introduction and overview of the relevant historical and literary movements. And even with a solid grounding in the period, like I have, it’s still hard to fathom why in the world Naslund made a few particular stylistic choices (when you don’t really know until page six hundred why the absolute first person narration was briefly broken by a small chapter in script format at page three hundred, maybe there’s some rethinking that should happen).Still, this is damn impressive for its vision, its thought, its very existence. It’s about the woman standing at home on the widow’s walk, about how she is not passive, about how as time passes she stops looking out to sea and starts looking up at the stars. It’s fanfiction to a particular work, to a place and a time, to the female experience, to history itself. And yes, if you couldn’t tell, it raised more intellectual admiration in me than emotional resonance, but to be fair, this really isn’t my favorite genre. This is exactly the sort of thing you will like, if you like that sort of thing, which I leave each of you to judge for yourself.
—Lightreads
I just moved to an ocean-side city in Eastern Massachusetts, so this book was a fun companion to this time of settling in near the sea.I have to agree with the reviewers who faulted this book for following the "strong, beautiful woman that all the men fall in love with" trope and for its "Forest Gumpian" qualities. The novel definitely suffers from ridiculous levels of coincidence where the heroine's life touches that of far too many famous 19th century figures ("Oh, I was walking in the woods looking for runaway slaves when I HAPPENED TO FIND Frederick Douglass and let him free!"), but that fault is more than compensated for by the marvelous prose and epic magnitude of the story. I thought it was incredibly ambitious -- even insanely ambitious! - to attempt a companion story to "Moby Dick," but I think Naslund achieved it. Una's mystical experience recounted in chapters 126-128 is as beautiful and powerful a meditation on existential crisis and spiritual transcendence as any I have ever read, and I have read many.I am glad that I took my time reading Una's story. I will remember many of these characters for a long time. Naslund's fictional creations like Uncle Torch, Fannie, Mary Starbuck, Judge and her own mother and father are more flesh and blood than her annoying Margaret Fuller (who really WAS annoying) and dull Maria Mitchell. I took away two stars for the over-reliance on actual historical figures (editor, where were you?) and contrived plot twists, and gave one back for the magnificent and courageous imagining of Captain Ahab. Seriously, how much creative moxie do you have to have to write THAT back-story? BRAVA.
—Victoria Weinstein
In this sometimes overwhelming take on the Ahab story, using a few characters from the classic novel, Sena Jeter Naslund visits the life of Una, the wife of Captain Ahab, and the time she spends with her Captain is surprisingly gentle and romantic. The two of them don't truly find one another until about halfway through the novel, however. The beginning of Una's life is just as interesting, though in different ways. She is born in Kentucky, lives for several years with a lighthouse-keeping family, and then, most excitingly, goes to sea. Some of the things that happen to her during her time on the waves haunt her for the remainder of the novel. The beauty of AHAB'S WIFE is in the supporting characters. David Poland, Susan, Frannie, the Judge, Mary Starbuck; these are interesting and beautifully drawn people, and I loved reading about (and from) them. Some characters were unnecessary and only removed focus from the story at hand. The subplot concerning Margaret Fuller could have been dropped entirely and it would have only tightened up the narrative (much to the benefit of the book as a whole). [image error]
—Pennystevens
