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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.
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
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(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
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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