Review by New York Times Review
Melville's book about sin and redemption should be read by everyone, Nathaniel Philbrick says. IT'S a hard sell Nathaniel Philbrick has undertaken in "Why Read MobyDick?" The novel's plot has been recycled for decades, inspiring films, radio dramas, cartoons, comic books, a television mini-series, a couple of heavy metal albums, a music video and a rap rendition. How many potential readers approach the masterwork of Herman Melville without already knowing the story of Captain Ahab and the white whale? Any? And why would such an overly exposed audience embrace a work of such heft, especially as almost every edition carries the added weight of ponderous academic commentary? "Moby-Dick" would appear to be one of those unfortunate books that are taught rather than enjoyed. But who knows how many teeter in the aisles of Barnes & Noble, both drawn and repelled by the promise of edification? It's the historian Nathaniel Philbrick's intent to give those uncertain consumers a gentle shove toward the "one book that deserves to be called our American Bible." He wants "you - yes, you - to read . . . 'Moby-Dick.'" Philbrick, whose "In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleslrip Essex" recounted the real-life inspiration for Melville's shipwreck, wears his erudition lightly. He broaches the novel in quirky thematic fashion, with gracefully written compact essays on topics like landlessness, chowder and sharks. His voice is that of a beloved professor lecturing with such infectious enthusiasm that one can almost, for a moment, believe in the possibility of a popular renaissance for Melville. But convincing and beguiling though his slender apologia is (the whole of it taking up less than a quarter of the space allotted to the Norton Critical Edition's appendixes), Philbrick doesn't have an audience held captive in a classroom. Still, his Bible metaphor applies in that not only is "Moby-Dick" a big fat book about the wages of sin and the elusiveness of redemption, but also one to which zealots return even as potential admirers push it away, put off by its size and its longtime residence on literature courses' reading lists. It's too bad. More capacious than ponderous, "Moby-Dick" has the wild and unpredictable energy of the great white whale itself, more than enough to heave its significance out of what Melville called "the universal cannibalism of the sea" and into the light. Melville challenged the form of the novel decades before James Joyce and a century before Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace. Calling for tools befitting the ambition of his task - "Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius's crater for an ink stand!" - Melville substituted dialogue and stage direction for a chapter's worth of prose. He halted the action to include a parody of the scientific classification of whales, a treatise on the whale as represented in art, a meditation on the complexity of rope, whatever snagged his attention. Reporting the exact day and time of his writing in a parenthetical aside, he "pulled back the fictive curtain and inserted a seemingly irrelevant glimpse of himself in the act of composition," the moment Philbrick identifies as his favorite in the novel. Melville may not have called this playfulness metafiction, but he defied strictures that shaped the work of his contemporaries, including that of Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated "Moby-Dick," calling it a "token of my admiration for his genius." Ahab doesn't appear until the 28 th of its 135 chapters. The vestigial plot is of the train-wreck variety. There is no conflict moving toward a crisis in "Moby-Dick" because the crisis is long past, the battle for the soul of the antihero won in a summary flashback made even more remote by the delirium that followed the castrating bite that took off Ahab's leg. The one emotion returned to him is vengeance, Ahab now "shaped in an unalterable mould." The die is cast; what's left of the narrative is denouement, all the characters save the narrator, Ishmael, dragged inexorably toward destruction. Philbrick reads the captain as a demagogue blinded by his profane quest. Ahab manipulates his crew into squandering both his investors' funds and their own lives to satisfy his immoral agenda - piloting his ship toward a doomed conflict with a murderous, uncontrollable, unstoppable monster variously interpreted as nature, God, fate and, on a level particular to the history of the United States, slavery. "I'd strike the sun if it insulted me," Ahab admits, supporting Philbrick's suggestion that "instead of writing history, Melville is forging an American mythology." Purer in his pride than a mere mortal, his grandness "plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep," the captain is more Icarus than Tom Joad or Rabbit Angstrom. Melville's America hurtles toward civil war, hobbled by slavery, as Ahab has been deformed by his first encounter with the evil that will drag him down to his death. His vision is both intimate, examining the intricacies of the tattoos on a savage's leg and, sometimes, exalted. For Ishmael, "a dreamy meditative man," the vantage from the masthead "is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea. ... The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor." The description is what Philbrick calls a "little sidebar of miraculous prose, one of many that Melville scatters like speed bumps throughout the book as he purposely slows the pace of his mighty novel to a magisterial crawl." But if the ship is becalmed or blown off course by one flight of fancy or another, each diversion is just a little stay of the end's certain execution. If light and life are composed of color, the whiteness of the whale is the "pallor of the dead" and "the shroud in which we wrap them." The color is "the most meaning symbol of spiritual things," Melville wrote, and "Moby-Dick" belongs as much to the 20th or 21st century as to the 19th. Fascism, the Holocaust, the threat of nuclear annihilation, terrorism - every failure of humanity can be projected onto the blank canvas of the beast's unwitting head. MELVILLE sailed on whaling expeditions and understood well the crushing labor required to sustain America's prosperity - to keep the whale oil burning in a rich man's lamp - as well as the delicate maneuvering required to pilot a crew whose "demographic diversity," as Philbrick calls it, predicted America's future. Caucasians, Indians, African-Americans, varied islanders, all are, Melville wrote, "federated along one keel" of the "death-glorious" Pequod, a ship both "hearse" and "fading phantom." A misdirected melting pot, it sails on, as Philbrick notes, under "a man divided, seared and parboiled by the conflagration raging inside him," one who heedlessly sacrifices all those who have pledged their allegiance to him. "The mythic incarnation of America: a country blessed," in Philbrick's words, "by God and by free enterprise that nonetheless embraces the barbarity it supposedly supplanted," we are a nation, and a species, ever poised on self-destruction. "Listen to every word" Philbrick says of what might be read as a cautionary tale, betraying an optimism he cannot have drawn from Melville. After all, the ending he saw was unavoidable extinction. Kathryn Harrison's new novel, "Enchantments," will be published next March.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 25, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* What a book Melville has written! Hawthorne exclaimed upon first reading Moby Dick. More than 150 years later, Philbrick echoes Hawthorne's enthusiasm. Although he repudiates the various interpretations of Melville's White Whale as a symbol of this or that human nemesis, Philbrick sees in Melville's story of the whale a mythically capacious emblem of the nation that incubated it pulsing with poetic imagination, threatened by grim contradictions, and doomed to a devastating catastrophe. Readers thus come to recognize, for instance, how Melville's portrayal of the Pequod's pious but hard-hearted owners mirrors the bifurcation separating the nation's high-spirited idealism from its real-world addiction to the profits of slavery. And in its harrowing denouement, this prescient novel anticipates the carnage of Cold Harbor and Antietam. To be sure, Philbrick sees in the novel more than a symbol of America's tragically flawed history; he marvels, in fact, at how deeply Melville plumbs mysteries that defy time and geography. By probing the circumstances surrounding Melville's writing of the novel, Philbrick illuminates the intense creative process through which the brooding author melded the darkest elements from the art of Hawthorne and Shakespeare in the crucible of his own fervent agnosticism. Sure to swell the readership of Melville's masterpiece.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Answering the negative of Philbrick's titular question is easy: Moby-Dick is intimidatingly large, scientifically rigorous, esoteric, and to some, may seem outdated. While the size of The Whale cannot be debated, Philbrick's entreaty is as approachable as it is persuasive. In this cogent and passionate polemic for Melville's masterpiece, Philbrick (In the Heart of the Sea) combines a critical eye and a reader's adoration to make a case for Moby-Dick. The plights of the Pequod, Ishmael and Ahab may seem irrelevant (or worse, quaint) compared to today's troubles, but Philbrick opines that within the pages of this American classic lie timeless archetypes whose relevance stretches across human history. Upon the loom of Melville's narrative run numerous threads of insight and argument dealing with subjects as diverse as multiculturalism, homoeroticism, and transcendental experiences of the natural world. Less lit-crit and more readers' guide, this tome will remind fans why they loved the book in the first place, and whet the appetites of trepid potential readers. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This brief title is historian Philbrick's (The Last Stand) valentine to Herman Melville's singular masterpiece-a book that, perhaps, is the most equally admired and avoided classic in American literature, although those who have embraced it know that it also is one of the few revered works capable of surpassing its formidable reputation. In numerous, brief chapters, Philbrick, who also narrates, presents in very simple terms his argument for why Melville's briny story of obsession and revenge becomes more relevant as history glides forward like the Pequod on its doomed voyage. Maybe the key to understanding life's mystery is knowing that, as aboard the ship, a madman is in charge, and you're powerless to stop him. He scrutinizes the novel's core characters-Ishmael, Queequeg, Pip, Starbuck, Ahab, and the whale itself-and ponders the ocean-deep well of Melville's creativity and melancholy. He was a man whose zeal for life was matched by an equally profound sadness. VERDICT While heartwarming for Melville fundamentalists, whether Philbrick's boundless enthusiasm for Moby-Dick is contagious enough to convince nonbelievers to take the 700-plus-page or 25-hour audio journey is debatable. But if this won't do it, nothing will. Glorious! ["While Philbrick may not persuade all readers who've been avoiding this tome to give it a try, he should succeed in swaying quite a few," read the review of the Viking hc, LJ 9/15/11.-Ed.]-Mike Rogers, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A slim celebration of the elements of a literary masterpieceand its moody, obsessive author.In his 2000 book, In the Heart of the Sea, historian Philbrick (The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of Little Bighorn, 2010, etc.) detailed the wreck of the Essex, a whaling ship that would become the model for the Pequod in Herman Melville's 1851 classic, Moby-Dick. Having read the novel more than a dozen times, he's inspired to undertake a brief study of what he feels makes the book so enduring. (However, it took a while to earn classic status, as he points out; a flop when it was first published, the book didn't earn the esteem of critics until after World War I.) The diversity of the crew and Melville's respect for each character anticipates decades of debates about racial tolerance, writes the author, and its interest in matters of religious truth, demagoguery and free enterprise ensure that American readers today can find resonances with contemporary social and political issues. But Philbrick isn't simply hunting for proof of the novel's ongoing "relevance." He praises Melville's acute understanding of "the microclimates of intimate human relations," takes a close look at some of the novel's more powerfully poetic passages and honors the Melville himself, who was plagued with self-doubt while writing the book. Melville's letters to his friend Nathaniel Hawthornewhich Philbrick argues are essential to understanding Moby-Dickreveal the novelist to be struggling with the composition of the novel as well as the spiritual concerns he addressed in it. Philbrick constructs the narrative in brief chapters, often no more than a couple of pages, and his literary analysis is sometimes thin. However, he doesn't want to dwell long on the book's contents, but rather motivate readers to discover the book for themselves.On that front, mission accomplished: Philbrick is an enthusiastic salesman for a sometimes daunting novel.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
