This book got fuckin weird at the end, which is why you've gotta love this Melville shit. I don't think anyone has every written something quite like the scene where Redburn has to awkwardly kill time in the parlor of the gay brothel while waiting around for his friend.

Melville wrote several long works to satisfy his own personal whimsy (Mardi, Moby-Dick, Pierre, Confidence-Man, Clarel). Each of these being bloated, disjointed, rambling, and overwrought, they tended to bomb sales-wise. In order to pay the bills, he also wrote more straightforward works, such as Redburn. As novels, they work so much better.

In Redburn, Melville shares his thoughts on a vast range of topics, but still manages to keep the narrative mostly on track; the tangents don't go on for too long, and they don't feel too far afield. It feels like a true, connected story. The rhapsodizing and philosophizing don't spin out of control, except in one grating chapter about an Italian street performer. And Melville even keeps his typical potshots against orthodox Christianity to a minimum, which is unusual even for his lighter novels (cf. my review of Typee.) In total, it's a good, honest story about an older boy's voyage to Liverpool and back.

It might have even gotten four stars, except for Harry Bolton. Harry is basically the Jar Jar Binks of the Melville canon. He's annoying and awful, but the narrator desperately tries to convince us to like him. There's a humorous twist at the end: Harry is killed by a whale on the last page

I read about a third maybe before saying “Yawn” and stopping. Where is the superb author of Moby-Dick and Bartleby? Not here. Leanly and cleanly written, but tedious—the observations of a first-time sailing “boy”—it’s probably great for those fascinated by 19th century shipping.