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Ahab’s Wife, or the Star-Gazer
Sena Jeter Naslund. Harperperennial Library: 2000 (paperback). ISBN: 0688177859. 688 pages.
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Everything you always wanted to know about existentialism, but didn’t ask, for fear that someone might actually tell you. But seriously, folks. The story of Ahab’s Wife is perhaps the best modern reworking of a classic novel that anyone, anywhere, has done so far. In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Ahab’s wife doesn’t get much page time. All we learn is that the vengeful Captain Ahab, he of the one leg and the terrible grudge against the large white whale that took it, left a young “girl-wife” behind in Nantucket when he went to sea aboard the Pequod. In the few spare details Melville offers about Mrs. Ahab, Sena Jeter Naslund apparently found enough inspiration to create a rich, complex, and very surprising character, the ever free-thinking Una Spenser. Ahab’s Wife remains spiritually and technically true to much of Melville’s masterpiece, but for all those of you who could never quite make it through Moby Dick, let it be said that this novel is different in one very important way-it’s continually interesting and intriguingly readable. Like Moby Dick, Naslund’s novel brings to life a vital and volatile period of American History, but this time it’s from a woman’s perspective. And because Una is a very special sort of woman, she brushes up against many of the most fascinating people, movements, and events of her time. Pick this one up and dive right in.
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