I'd like to believe I'm nearly as strong, forgiving, compassionate, thoughtful, open & positively persistent as my identically named sister is in this moving novel which, interestingly, pays tribute to the strength of women during a time when they had to take triumph if they sought it. Deep tones, period language, fascinating philosophical, religious & political paths, artistic & scientific pursuits, whale-hunting thrills & dangers, life on & by the sea, and physical & spiritual voyages over time & place are each so well presented in a richly satisfying novel. This is a story that reveals a woman triumphing over many tragedies and becoming more of a complete human being through the choices she makes for herself and those she loves. Una is Capt Ahab's wife, Capt of the Pequod of Moby Dick. But that is not all she is: he is her 2nd husband & not her last. She is first daughter; then niece, cousin, neighbor, a cherished friend to a runaway slave, and also to a dwarf-sized bounty hunter, a judge, gay neighbors & real contemporaries of the era; she is also a runaway cabin 'boy,' a whale hunter, a star-gazer, a mother, and an industrious & creative business woman. So many ideas are woven together in this thoughtful book full of worthy quotes that I had to have my own copy so I could mark them. :) If you seek a story full of thought-provoking ideas, and a remarkably strong heroine in an unlikely time & place, this is the perfect book. I was sad to see Una go at the end of my time with her. I actually would put the book down to linger on various points before I found myself willing to read on. Like a dear friend's visit, I wanted to savor so many points & parts of her life that I preferred to draw this read out over a longer time, rather than see it end quickly.

Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last.


Do you remember Captain Ahab from Moby Dick? Inspired by a brief passage in that classic Melville tale, Sena Jeter Naslund tells us of Una Spenser, that fabled captain's wife and the vast life that she led before and after her marriage. As her life progresses in Nantucket, Una rubs elbows with many of the thinkers of the time including Margaret Fuller and Frederick Douglass. Personally, the most fascinating part of the story is Una's time at sea which does take a number of bizarre twists. The love story between Ahab and Una is one of both spiritual and physical but most of their time together is fleeting as she stays on the mainland and he goes out to sea. I felt the story really dragged for too long and would have certainly whittled down the 150+chapters to something much slimmer.


Goodreads review published 28/03/20

I loved this book! It is flawed - too wordy at times, some flat characters and strained interactions, a rushed ending. But even with its shortcomings, it is a beautiful book. It reads like poetry so much of the book. It was entertaining, thought provoking, disturbing at times, but ultimately a brilliant story. I loved the way the author weaved history - the transcendentalists, slavery, abolition, whaling - into a clever story inspired by Moby Dick. Moby Dick has been one of my favorite books since I read it as a sophomore in college, but the female perspective in this story was fascinating. I particularly appreciated how the author renders the significance and beauty of the feminine arts - sewing, cooking, mothering, etc. This book went straight to my heart.

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?