It has been said that one can see farther only by standing on the shoulders of giants. Ahab's Wife, Sena Naslund's epic work of historical fiction, honors that aphorism, using Herman Melville's Moby-Dick as looking glass into early-19th-century America. Through the eye of an outsider, a woman, she suggests that New England life was broader and richer than Melville's manly world of men, ships, and whales. This ambitious novel pays tribute to Melville, creating heroines from his lesser characters, and to America's literary heritage in general.

Una, named for the heroine of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, flees to the New England coast from Kentucky to escape her father's puritanism and to pursue a more exalted life. She gets whaling out of her system early: going to sea at 16 disguised as a boy, Una has her ship sunk by her own monstrous whale, and survives a harrowing shipwreck: I was so horrified by the whale's deliberate charge that I could not move. Then my own name flew up from below like a spear: "Una!" Giles' voice broke my trance, and I scrambled down the rigging. No sooner did my foot touch the deck than there was such a lurch that I fell to my face. I heard and felt the boards break below the waterline, the copper sheathing nothing but decorative foil. The whole ship shuddered. A death throe. The ship dies, but Una returns to land to pursue the life of the mind. The novel's opening line--"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last"--also diminishes Melville's hero in the broader scheme of things. Naslund exposes the reader to the unsung, real-life heroes of Melville's world, including Margaret Fuller and her Boston salon, and Nantucket astronomer Maria Mitchell. There is a chance meeting with a veiled Nathaniel Hawthorne in the woods, and throughout the novel the story brims with references to the giants of literature: Shakespeare, Goethe, Coleridge, Keats, and Wordsworth. Although her novel runs long at nearly 700 pages, Naslund has created an imaginative, entertaining, and very impressive work. --Ted Leventhal


From Publishers Weekly
"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last," says Una Spenser, the eponymous narrator, in the first sentence of this deliciously old-fashioned bildungsroman, adventure story and romance. Naslund's inspiration, based on one reference in Moby-Dick, may not satisfy aficonados of Melville's dense, richly symbolic masterpiece, but it should please most other readers with its suspenseful, affecting, historically accurate and seductive narrative. At age 12, Una escapes her religiously obsessed father in rural Kentucky to live with relatives in a lighthouse off New Bedford, Mass. When she is 16Adisguised as a boyAshe runs off to sea aboard a whaler, which sinks after being rammed by its quarry. Una and two young men who love her are the only survivors of a group set adrift in an open boat, but the dark secret of their cannibalism will leave its mark. Rescued, Una is wed to one of the young men by the captain of the Pequod, handsome, commanding Ahab, who has not as yet met the white whale that will be his destiny. These eventsArecounted in stately prose nicely dotted with literary allusionsAtake the reader only through the first quarter of the book. Una's later marriage to AhabAa passionate and intellectually satisfying relationshipAthe loss of her mother and her newborn son in one night, and her life as a rich woman in Nantucket are further developments in a plot teeming with arresting events and provocative ideas. Una is an enchanting protagonist: intellectually curious, sensitive, imaginative and kind. But Naslund also endows her with restlessness, rash impetuosity and a refreshing skepticism about traditional religion, qualities that humanize what verges on an idealized personality, and that motivate Una's search for spiritual sustenance. Unitarianism and Universalism are two of the religions she investigates; other "dark issues of our time" include slavery, and the position of women. Social and cultural details texture the lengthy, episodic, discursive narrative. Una's search for identity brings her friendship with such real life figures as writer Margaret Fuller and astronomer Maria Mitchell, and with such colorful fictional characters as an escaped slave and a dwarf bounty hunter. Even Halley's Comet makes an appearance. Provocatively, Naslund (The Disobedience of Water) suggests a new source of Ahab's demented rage to kill the whale who has "unmasted" him. Some elements of the novel jar, especially Naslund's tendency to pay rhapsodic tributes to Una's questing spirit; a surfeit of noble, large-souled and amazingly generous characters; and the symmetrical neatness of the plot. In the last third of the book, readers may become weary of Una's spiritual reflections and the minutiae of her daily routine. But these are small faults in a splendid novel that amply fulfills its ambitious purpose offering a sweeping, yet intimate picture of a remarkable woman who both typifies and transcends her times. Illustrations by Christopher Wormell. 150,000 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo; 20-city author tour; BOMC main selection; Simon & Schuster audio. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Building on a brief, if intriguing, passage in Moby Dick, this ambitious novel relates the story of Captain Ahab's much younger wife. These are dangerous fictional seas, but Naslund (The Disobedience of Water) navigates them skillfully, using her thorough understanding of the classic material to create an imaginative tale that stands on its own. Passages featuring characters from Moby DickAand often echoing its narrative structureAwill not entirely please the purist, but for the most part they fit seamlessly into the whole. The book's heart is its title character and narrator, Una, one of the most independent and intelligent voices to appear in recent historical fiction. Una reflects thrillingly on her adventures, including exile from a Kentucky home both sublime and brutal, an idyll in a New England lighthouse, a season on a whaler disguised as a boy, risky assistance to a runaway slave, and survival in an open boat under hideous conditions. By the time of her (irregular) marriage to Ahab, she has known passion, terror, pain, and joy beyond the ordinary and is her beloved captain's intellectual and emotional soul mate. This tour de force does not attain its model's literary genius, but nevertheless it isAyes!Aa whale of a read. Recommended for all fiction collections.-AStarr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, VA Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Naslund's idea for this story came from a passage in Herman Melville's classic MOBY-DICK. The result is the creation of one woman's world that is at once plausible and as fascinating as her "famous" husband's. Maryann Plunkett brings a spry energy to the production, playing up Una's youthful vibrancy. Her male voices sound a little as though she's reading the part of the Big Bad Wolf in a bedtime story, but this choice actually works well! It serves to reinforce the sense that Una herself is hauling up her own seafaring tale. R.A.P. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Una, named by her mother after the personification of Truth in Spenser's Faerie Queene, is so vividly portrayed that she seems more real than fictional in Naslund's fanciful opus. A questioning woman, before she ever met the legendary Captain Ahab, she was a defiant daughter, a lover of literature, an accomplished seamstress, a seafaring adventurer (disguised as a boy aboard a whaling ship), survivor of a horrific shipwreck, and a spiritual seeker. This narrative, written in Una's voice, captures the exciting and pivotal times of mid-nineteenth-century New England, reflecting the pressing issues of the day, such as slavery, the position of women, and the influence of religion. It is part adventure, part love story, brimming with references to literature--Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, and others. Una's life intersects with literary personalities both "real" and fictional--as in the case of her chance meeting with Hawthorne, his face covered with a black veil, an eerie mixture of the author and his own fictional characters. In Boston, Una befriends Margaret Fuller and is introduced to transcendentalism through Fuller's "Conversations with Women"; in Nantucket, she shares night sky watching with astronomer Maria Mitchell and is moved by hearing Frederick Douglass speak. And, of course, there's Ahab. Una is the wife of the captain of the Pequod during his fateful pursuit of Moby Dick, and she is the mother of their son. She has the ability to rise and rise again after illness, destruction, and loss. And through it all she possesses a sense of wonder, the experience of divinity in all things. A complex and sophisticated book, brilliantly written, beautifully illustrated. Grace Fill


From Kirkus Reviews
Nothing in Naslund's previous fiction (The Disobedience of Water, p. 571, etc.) prepares us for this extraordinary tale: a ravishingly detailed re-creation of the worlds of 19th-century antebellum America and of Melvilles seminal Moby Dick. The protagonist, and primary narrator, is Una Spenser (whose bookish mother named her after the heroine of The Faerie Queene), whom we first meet in her native Kentucky, where shes returned to give birth to her first childsired by her second husband: middle-aged Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod. Naslund's flexible and fascinating narrative then leaps from Una's ordeal (both her baby and her beloved mother die) and an inspiring new friendshipbackward, to the story of her upbringing among relatives who tend a New England lighthouse, apprenticeship at sea disguised as a cabin boy, conflicted first marriage to an increasingly deranged husband, and eventual union with the brooding Ahab, whom even his young wife's resourceful love cannot deflect him from his vengeful pursuit of the white whale he imagines Evil Incarnate. Then Una returns to Kentucky, thence back east (Nantucket), where her restless intellect involves her with New England's ruling intellectual elite (including Transcendentalist icon Margaret Fuller) and the burgeoning abolitionist movement. The climactic pages, concentrated on Ahab's increasing monomania and Una's realization that hes lost to her, vibrate with tragic intensity. And the long meditative denouement, alive with echoes of Melville's cadences, memorably depicts Una's gradual fulfillment in a society poised on the cusp of civil war, her being saved by living testimony of (her surviving son, Justice) and by her gratifying, if belated, relationship with the Pequod's sole survivor) to the power of love and service to others, both neutralizing the fury that had consumed the doomed Ahab. Excepting a few inconsequential false steps, a genuine epic of America: an inspired homage to one of our greatest writers that brilliantly reinterprets, and in many ways rivals, his masterpiece. (First printing of 150,000; Book-of-the-Month main selection; $150,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Call Me Una...

In her new novel, Ahab's Wife, Sena Jeter Naslund takes perhaps the least eligible bachelor in all of American literature and makes his marriage and pillow talk the very stuff of her book. It is a tall order she sets for herself, and one that she does not fail in filling. There's no mistaking Naslund's Ahab for Melville's Ahab, but her captain has his own, less imposing charms to offer. The real focus, of course, is on the title character, the wonderfully wrought Una Spenser, Ahab's wife, in whose labyrinthine adventures of the heart Ahab's hand is but a single lovely room.

Naslund is no stranger to the challenges of a novel based on the reimagining of a literary figure. Her novel Sherlock in Love begins with Watson's decision to write a biography of his old friend. After putting an advertisement in the paper for information about Sherlock Holmes, Watson discovers many details of the famous detective's life that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never had the time to mention. Ahab's Wife is a decidedly more ambitious project, for who is the archetypal forbidding patriarch in our literature but Ahab? And yet Naslund's attempt to show us another side of his life is wholly believable and deeply moving.

The novel begins with Una Spenser delivering Ahab's first child in a rural cabin in Kentucky, while the captain is at sea. The baby dies, as does Una's mother, who has gone to find a doctor. She explains her reasons for starting her narrative there: "I needed to tell those terrible things first, to pass through the Scylla and Charybdis early in my voyage of telling; otherwise, I feared I would turn back, be unable to complete my story, if those terrors loomed ahead." Safely past, she returns to her childhood and begins her story there. After a terrible fight with her Methodist zealot father, Una is sent to live with her aunt and uncle, who are lighthouse keepers near Rhode Island. It is there that Una first discovers her love of the sea. The love is not immediate. Upon first glance at the sea, Una says with contempt, "It's not wild enough." But when two handsome sailors, Giles Bonebright and Kit Sparrow, arrive from New Bedford, Una becomes enraptured, first with them, and then with the ocean they speak of so reverently.

By now Una's mother has become pregnant with her second child, and mother and daughter have plans to meet in New Bedford. Una waits for her mother at the Sea-Fancy Inn, which is across the street from the Spouter Inn, which readers will remember from Chapter Three of Moby-Dick. When Una's mother sends a letter explaining that she has miscarried and will return home to recuperate, Una is devastated. She cuts off her hair, buys an outfit of boy's clothing, and runs down to the wharf to find a ship that will take her as cabin boy. With her eyes well trained from days spent in the lighthouse, she proves her worth as a lookout aboard the Sussex. Her first time at the top of a mast occasions a Melvillian description: "Up and up! How to tell you about it? You have looked from the edge of a cliff? Climbed your own trees? Those efforts suggest a whiff of rigging-climbing -- as the volatile oil from an orange peel suggests the full flavor of its ecstatic juice." Naslund has drunk deep from the well of Melville's prose in preparation for this novel, and this shines though in her rich, extravagant language.

Here begins the heart of the novel -- Una's adventures at sea. It is here that she comes of age and here that she meets Captain Ahab. Many other characters from Melville's novel appear. Tashtego and Daggoo are found jumping from their unsuccessful whaler to join on to the Pequod as she pulls into port. We find Pip nearly burned to death in a house fire, then rejecting the Nantucket school for a chance to go to sea with Ahab. Even Ishmael himself appears, asserting that his name is David Pollack, but "Call me Ishmael."

Naslund uses these references to the events in Moby-Dick in interesting ways. When Ahab leaves Una behind as he sets out for another two-year voyage on the Pequod, we know that this is to be his final trip because Una sees Ishmael and Queequeg board the ship at the last minute. Using our knowledge of this outcome, Naslund turns Una's sighting of the two sailors into a dark portent. In this and many other ways, Naslund's novel successfully weaves itself into the margins of Melville's. The tremendous sacrifice made by whaling families -- of men who leave their families for two or three years at a time, return for no more than three or four months, and then set out again -- is rendered more vividly in Naslund's book. Never in Moby-Dick do we feel the numb outrage of those short, insufficient visits between voyages as we feel it in Ahab's Wife, after the Pequod departs, and Una walks homeward, reviewing all the things she hasn't told her husband.

Una's suffering is the blood of this wonderfully written novel. As she gropes and strides (and writes, for the novel is her memoir) her way through the numerous tragedies that befall her (Ahab's death is only the beginning), her determination to cherish her pockmarked life is as moving as it is vast. And for those who make it to the end of this 666-page masterpiece, the novel's conclusion holds a clever surprise.

—Jacob Silverstein

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last." This is destined to be remembered as one of the most-recognized first sentences in literature--along with "Call me Ishmael." Sena Jeter Naslund has created an entirely new universe with a transcendent heroine at its center who will be every bit as memorable as Captain Ahab. Ahab's Wife is a novel on a grand scale that can legitimately be called a masterpiece: beautifully written, filled with humanity and wisdom, rich in historical detail, authentic and evocative. Melville's spirit informs every page of her tour de force. Una Spenser's marriage to Captain Ahab is certainly a crucial element in the narrative of Ahab's Wife, but the story covers vastly more territory. After a spellbinding opening scene, the tale flashes back to Una's childhood in Kentucky; her idyllic adolescence with her aunt and uncle's family at a lighthouse near New Bedford; her adventures disguised as a cabin boy on a whaling ship; her first marriage to a fellow survivor who descends into violent madness; courtship and marriage to Ahab; life as mother and a rich captain's wife in Nantucket; involvement with Frederick Douglass; and a man who is in Nantucket researching his novel about his adventures on her ex-husband's ship. Ahab's Wife is a breathtaking, magnificent, and uplifting story of one woman's spiritual journey, informed by the spirit of the greatest American novel, but taking it beyond tragedy to redemptive triumph.

FROM THE CRITICS

Wally Lamb - Book

Ahab's Wife is sustenance for the mind and the soul.

Bret Lott - Book

This is a great American novel.

Newsday

This is truly a grand. . . adventure story whose heroine survives on her intellect and courage. .

Louise Erdrich

An intense treat, powerfully written, Ahab's Wife is one of the best contemporary novels I have read in years.

Los Angeles Times

Beautifully written. Lyrical...alluring and wise. Read all 16 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Ahab's Wife is a worthy female companion to Moby-Dick and a tour de force in its own right. — Gail Godwin

Based on 19th century sources and peopled with a rich array of fictional, mythic and historical characters, this ambitious novel is a kind of technicolor dream quilt that turns Moby-Dick inside out and stitches it back together....Harrowing, poignant and comical by turns, Ahab's Wife is an audacious romp through mid-19th century New England history that is amply informed by both scholarship and imagination. A spanking good read. — Laurie Robertson-Lorant

Ahab's Wife joins a distinguished tradition of literary works inspired by Moby-Dick. Sena Jeter Naslund's homage to Melville is steeped in his work and at the same time explores a world that Melville left largely uncharted: the world of woman's experience in nineteenth-century America. She weaves a richly imagined tapestry of historical details, compelling characters, literary history, metaphysics, and a gripping plot. Ahab's Wife is a riveting novel." — Elizabeth Renker

Ahab's Wife is an epic tour de force, and deserves its rightful place next to Melville's classic. Ambitious, powerful, heartbreaking, and transcendent at once, Una Spenser's tale of a life fully lived gives us what we crave: a compelling story beautifully told. This is a great American novel. — Brett Lott

Ahab's Wife joins a distinguished tradition of literary works inspired by Moby-Dick. Sena Jeter Naslund's homage to Melville is steeped in his work and at the same time explores a world that Melville left largely uncharted: the world of woman's experience in nineteenth-century America. She weaves a richly imagined tapestry of historical details, compelling characters, literary history, metaphysics, and a gripping plot. Ahab's Wife is a riveting novel.  — Elizabeth Renker