Book Review: Ahab's Wife

Grade: 3.5/5

Not long ago, I finished reading Ahab's Wife, by Sena Jeter Naslund. The recent success of books like Ahab's Wife, Wind Done Gone, March, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, etc. suggests a new route to a best-seller: take a great and beloved novel, and retell it from the point of view of one of the novel's secondary or peripheral characters. In the case of Ahab's Wife, that peripheral character is...(smack yourself if you don't guess this correctly)...Ahab's wife, who is left behind in Nantucket while her husband blusters around the ocean in pursuit of Moby Dick.

The story follows Una Spenser for several years, beginning with her home in Kentucky, her years spent living at a lighthouse, her world explorations as she joins the crew of a whaling ship, her various romances and heartbreaks, etc. The story follows her for several years after the end of Moby Dick, as she responds to Ahab's [SPOILER ALERT!] death and is again faced with the daunting task of picking up the pieces of her life.

The book is at its very best during the times when it overlaps with events and characters described in Moby Dick. Our familiarity with the events of that story creates a unique sort of suspense - even though I knew exactly what was going to happen, I was compelled to keep reading for the sake of the characters, who didn't yet know about the demise of The Pequod at sea.

The main character of the story, Una, sometimes felt a little contrived to me. To understand what she is like, take a 21st century college graduate with a degree in comparative literature and transport her back to the early 1800s and enjoy watching how much better she is than her contemporaries. She's into new age spirituality, despises racism and traditional gender roles, makes tons of money but never forgets her roots, etc. and so on. In short, she's the perfect Oprah guest. To me, she only really made sense as a foil for Ahab. She was defined by the things that Ahab was not. Ahab was defiant of his fate; Una rolls with the punches. Ahab was obsessed with revenge; Una bears a casual interest in everything, but has no obsessions. Ahab deifies himself; Una loves looking at the stars because they make her feel small (or whatever). Despite the fact that she is a total anachronism, Una is still an interesting and compelling main character, if not an entirely believable one.

The novel is extremely well-written. Naslund has a real ear for putting together a sentence (a faculty that I have not demonstrated in the construction of this sentence). However, her strength occasionally proves to be her downfall. There are moments in the book where Naslund gets so carried away with her ability to make up adjectives and turn nouns into verbs, that she seems to overlook the fact that the things she is saying are either 1) hopelessly trite or 2) nonsensical.
Example:

Moonless, the sky was an utter darkness (as was the sea, which met it seamlessly), strewn with stars, as was the sea occasionally, when the swell of some wave before me would bulge up to reflect briefly the light of some star behind me, before rolling it under the water. Can the sea thus swallow even the stars? (emphasis added).

If this question is posed literally, the answer is: no. The sea cannot swallow the stars. Even the smallest stars are larger than our entire planet. If the question is posed figuratively, then I suppose we could answer: if by 'swallow' you mean 'reflect' and by 'stars' you mean 'light from the star's, then yes. If the question is posed metaphorically, the answer is: what are you talking about? This is a minor example - the first one I found while flipping through the pages - but this sort of thinking is ubiquitous in Ahab's Wife and I find it slightly grating. There are entire passages in the book which sound great until you try to actually apply your brain to them, at which point it becomes clear that this is more of an exercise in hypnotism than in deep thinking. Not all novels have to be deep, but I found the bulk of Una's philosophical ruminations to be superficial (at best) or mere exercises in verbosity (at worst).

I recommend this book with the following caveats:

1. Be willing to skim when the thinking gets muddled.
2. Be familiar with Moby Dick (Sparknotes are fine, but you should know the basic characters, themes, and plot).

Have you read this book? What did you think of it? Am I way off?