Moby Dick

One of the things I do with my summer vacation is try to read some of those things in The Canon that I've never gotten around to. This summer I tackled the great white whale, one of those books that everybody knows about but nobody actually reads. Well, I have now by God read it, and God willing, I may never read it again.

Everybody knows the basics. Captain Ahab, peg leg, big white whale. In no particular order, let me highlight a few of the novel's other salient features.

Melville's Prose
There's a reason that nobody knows any lines of Melville except "Call me Ishmael" (Knowledgeable trekkies also know "From hell's heart I stab at thee"). Melville can write sentences that are so turgid, so trapped in circuitous layers of lugubrious prose, that readers can despair of ever coming out the other side.

Left to his own devices, Melville could never tap out something as simple as "I ate a hamburger." He would have to render the thought as, "In the midst of this, I found that it was time, nay, even past the precipitous moment, in which I should at least consume for the furtherance of my bodily health, some food, though not actually made of the pig tissues not uncommonly refered to by the appelation of 'ham," instead issuing from the death and subsequent regradation into pieces not entirely small but certainly lesser than that of eggs of eagles or rarer sparrowhawks, of the noble creature of the prarie, the cow, the bovine progenator of many smaller cattle and calves, refashioned into a patty that could be pressed (as, yea, even the powers of heaven and earth press against the very heart and substance of human beings themselves struggling against the constant pressure) between two slices of bread. Oh bread, thou bread, thou sacred substance of sustenance. How do you press against the burnt remnants of vibrant life?"

This is one part of Moby Dick's reputation as a book of great length. But it doesn't really go on for sixty gazillion pages-- it just feels that way when you're trying to read it.

BUDDY TALES
The first little chunk of the novel is actually a cute little buddy tale between Ishamel and Queequeeg. For the early 1800's, this novel is remarkably progressive in its view of race and culture. Ishmael is a newby to whaling who is thrown in with the more experienced Queequeeg who is an African "pagan." Modern readers will be struck by how much of their growing friendship is played out in bed (they share one at the rooming house), though if you're familiar with the early 19th century, you may already know that male friendships were a bit more open than our modern versions.

HISTORIC FIRST
"But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand..."

I hereby submit that this line gives Melville the bragging rights for the first literary genesis of "Talk to the hand..."

MANY BOOKS
One of the reasons that this book seems to go on forever and a day is that it is actually several books shuffled in together. The story of Ahab, the Pequod, and Moby Dick itself probably doesn't take up a third of the book; maybe not even a quarter. There's a whole other book in here that is a non-fiction textbook about whales-- the types, their anatomy, their heads. Then there's also a book about the practices, language and history of whaling itself. These books make no pretense of maintaining the narrative thrust of the novel; I'm not even sure you can argue that Melville maintains Ishmael's voice of narrator rather than simply inserting his own. (Once the two friends are booked on the Pequod, Ishmael essentially disappears as a character until the final couple of pages)

The expository sections are actually kind of informative and interesting. Had I expected them, or had I encountered them somewhere other than the middle of a novel I was trying to read, I probably would have enjoyed them. If Melville's done nothing else, he's managed to create a very complete contemporary record of the whaling industry.

The detail and specificity of these sections does serve as a kind of counter-balance to the heavy burden of symbolism that Melville lays on much of the novel. At least, I think you could make that argument. But it's hard to avoid the impression that for a book this long, there isn't very much story going on.

THE BIG FINISH
For about 450 pages, not much of anything happened. As noted above, we floated away from the Pequod for long sections, and when we did return, it was for scenes that didn't do much except capture a piece of daily shipboard routine or allow Melville to wax philisophic about something. Understand, I am not afraid of Big Books. I've tackled most of the biggies and finished them off with relish. Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead make great weekend reads. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a great little party. Those vast rambling Victorian monstrosities? Bring them on.

Nor does painfully opaque prose scare me off. Heart of Darkness is one of my all-time favorites.

But after 450 pages, only sheer dogged determination that I would finish the damn thing kept me going. Otherwise, I would easily have made a simple trade for more enjoyable pastimes like, say, being poked in the eye with a pointy stick.

But then, as the end of the book approaches, something magical happens. Melville's writing punches up. Things Get Interesting, and not just on the literal chasing-a-big-whale level; Melville's novel starts to work on its larger issues, the battle of man against God and the universe, the nature of humanity, all that Really Deep stuff.

I suspect that the people who love this book have mostly fallen in love with the end and the flood of book pheremones has somehow erased the memory of all that came before. Like the mother of a newborn, their affection for what's in front of them has minimized the pain involved in getting there.

At least, that's my theory. I have avoided reading any critical treatments of Moby Dick so that I could reach my own conclusions. As I did with William Carlos Williams years ago, I will eventually turn to learned voices to help me get a handle on why anyone would ever tout this as Great and Important Literature. I expect I'll get it-- I can be taught.

In the meantime, I'd be curious to see how this would read if pared down to the actual story. Maybe the long sidetrips are a critical part of the rhythm and pace of the book. Maybe if I read it a second or third time, things would better fall into place for me.

However, as the novel itself reminds me, life is short, and the attempts of humans to pursue those things that are greater, powerful and more imponderable than mere human capabilities-- well, those things end badly. So perhaps I will leave well enough alone.

Waiter Rant

Here's a blog that has made the leap to book form, and done it well. The blog waiterrant.net has won awards and drawn much attention for its anonymous author's writings about the ups and downs of his life as a waiter.

But the book is not simply a collection of blog posts, but a wok that stands nicely on its own. Funny, informative, and well-crafted, it is more a memoir than a simple rant.

This guy writes well and honestly. He's had a bit of a journey himself (started out as a seminary student) and is pushing forty-- old enough to start questioning if he really intends to be a waiter his whole life. His world is dark and not always very nice, yet still reveals moments of grace. The characters can be decent and honorable, or venal, petty and selfish-- and that includes our narrator himself.

There's lots to learn here about the restaurant business, but what raises the book above the level of a collection of anecdotes is the writer's own journey as he tries to, essentially, grow up. It's raw and immediate-- part of his journey is the production of the very book we're reading-- but he's funny and smart, and the book never descends into excesses of whiny navel-gazing.

As the blurbs will undoubtedly say, you probably won't look at restaurants the same way again. But you may well wish you could go eat at one in the company of this interesting cynic.

Bone

This is a lazy post, but I've been out of town.

I recommend Jeff Smith's comics masterpiece to everyone, because there's simply no one for whom this is a bad choice.

It's funny in a classic slapstick way (the cow race is one of the greatest payoffs in all of literature). It's funny in a witty way (Moby Dick jokes-- who has the nerve?). It has great fantasy adventure, a tough-as-nails heroine (two, now that I think about it), a host of completely believable characters. An involving yet comprehensible plot. A fully realized fantasy world. Really cool art. And it's all totally g-rated and yet totally sophisticated.

This is great comics adventure fantasy fiction with humor and heart. It deserves to be way more well-known and widely read than it is. A great gift for the comics/adventure/fantasy fan in your life, young or old.

The Worst Hard Time

Timothy Egan's book should be required reading for every American.

Most of us have some vague knowledge of the dust bowl of the 1930's, but this is a work that brings it home with an unmatched power and vividness.

Egan has all the usual features of this kind of history-- the facts, figures, dates, statistics. But what takes this book up a notch is his extensive use of survivors' stories. The doctor, the cowboy, the Indian, the newspaperman, the school teacher-- all of their stories unfold year by painful year, as their dreams and aspirations dry up and blow away.

It's a natural disaster of stunning proportions in which the misguided hand of man remade the face of the American plains. At its worst, the dust bowl spawned storms so awful that they blew all the way to New York City and Washington DC. And yet beyond that large scale lie so many hard and painful stories of individuals beaten and broken by this disaster.

The personal stories make it all real. And in a cruel twist that mirrors the pain of the dust bowl itself, many of these stories turn out to be collected from the children, so that the usual comforting subtext of survivors tales (since I'm reading about this person, surely s/he got through it okay to tell the tale) is subverted. We reach the final chapters thinking, "Surely this person did not survive all those years, all that pain, all that, loss, to be beaten down in the end." And yet, they were. Multiply that by thousands upon thousands of Americans, and maybe we can begin to understand.

This is not exactly a cheery book, and it comes with a reminder that much of the West still bears the scars of the dust bowl, but it is a book that makes an important chapter of American history clear and comprehensible.