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A Novel
by Chris Bachelder, Jennifer Habel
Book Reviewed by:A startlingly original, incantatory novel about marriage, mortality, and making art.
In the endless days of the pandemic, a woman spends her time sorting fact from fiction in the life and work of Herman Melville. As she delves into Melville's impulsive purchase of a Massachusetts farmhouse, his fevered revision of Moby-Dick there, his intense friendship with neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his troubled and troubling marriage to Elizabeth Shaw, she becomes increasingly obsessed by what his devotion to his art reveals about cost, worth, and debt. Her preoccupation both deepens and expands, and her days' work extends outward to an orbiting cast of Melvillean questers and fanatics, as well as to biographers and writers—among them Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell—whose lives resonate with Melville's. As she pulls these distant figures close, her quarantine quest ultimately becomes a midlife reckoning with her own marriage and ambition.
Absorbing, charming, and intimate, Dayswork considers the blurry lines between life and literature, the slippage between what happens and what gets recorded, and the ways we locate ourselves in the lives of others. In wry, epigrammatic prose, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel have crafted an exquisite and daring novel.
This morning I discovered a list, derived from student complaints, of the ten writers most likely to put you to sleep.
It's actually just nine writers, I discovered, because Herman Melville
is mistakenly listed twice.
Over coffee, I read my husband the list of the "biggest snoozers":
The Melvillian chronicle that emerges is more or less chronological, but Dayswork is hardly a straightforward biography, though it is heavily informed by the work of several biographers, most notably Hershel Parker (referred to for most of the novel simply as "The Biographer") and Elizabeth Hardwick. Dayswork itself is emphatically a novel, one that continually returns to Melville's life but that intersperses broader considerations of marriage, aging, romantic and platonic love, the life of the artist, and the elusiveness of happiness. If you're wondering whether it's possible to comprehend, much less enjoy, a novel so enmeshed with Melville even if you've never read Moby-Dick, I'm here to assure you that it certainly is...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
A love letter to literature. Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins
I was equally charmed and fascinated by Dayswork, this slender but capacious book about marriage and solitude, about Melville and Hawthorne, about literature and obsession and whether they might not be the same thing. Wry, intimate, and wholly original, the novel surprised me and edified me with every page I eagerly turned. Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies
Dayswork is a wonder. I cannot think of another book, another reading experience, entirely like this one. It is suffused with the pleasures of reading, of immersion, of companionship in all its forms. Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, author of Madeleine is Sleeping
How to describe this deeply moving and entirely original book Dayswork is at once a portrait of a marriage, a meditation on art and ambition, a pandemic novel, a middle-age comedy, a brilliant collage of Herman Melville, and a tour de force of collaborative writing. Above all, it is a love story. Out of the most difficult times and unlikely materials, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel have created something that can only be described as extraordinary.One of the topics explored in Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel is Herman Melville's home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Arrowhead, which he went into significant debt to purchase but where he spent what seem to have been the happiest and most productive years of his life. Dayswork additionally mentions the homes of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson, also in Western Massachusetts. Below are these and more of the many author homes literary road-trippers are able to visit in the Bay State.
Arrowhead (Herman Melville, Pittsfield)
Melville's home, where he lived from 1850–1863, is now owned and operated by the Berkshire County Historical Society, which also has its headquarters there. Aspiring writers can, for ...
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