The classic story "Moby-Dick," written in the Berkshires by author Herman Melville more than 170 years ago, figures prominently in two recent novels.
"Wild and Distant Seas" is about a minor character in the classic "Moby-Dick" who finds her own voice and story. "Dayswork: A Novel" is an odyssey that takes place during the COVID-19 quarantine, featuring a couple in which the wife is obsessed with Melville.
The authors joined us to discuss their novels: Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel, husband and wife, are the authors of "Dayswork." Tara Karr Roberts is the author of "Wild and Distance Seas: A Novel."
Carrie Healy, NEPM: Both of your novels have ties to "Moby-Dick," Pittsfield, Massachusetts, writer Herman Melville's best-known novel that features complex themes, rich writing and a flexible interpretation.
Like your novels, "Moby-Dick" is much more than just about 1800s whaling, and more than just the sum of its parts. I don't think that anyone could really say that the novel was rooted in the place where the author wrote it. Melville's house, of course, Arrowhead, with views of the Berkshires, does not invoke whaling to me. So, Tara, how important is it for you to be in a certain place to be able to write about a certain place?
Tara Karr Roberts, author, "Wild And Distant Seas": Well, I had never been to Nantucket when I started writing about a book that's adjacent to "Moby-Dick," so obviously it can't be too important.
I live in rural northern Idaho, and for a while I kept saying, "What on earth am I doing?" When I started writing this novel that was fairly rooted in the East Coast, it did take a lot of careful study and talking to people who had lived there and really thinking about the landscape. I did eventually get a grant and get to spend some time on Nantucket while I was writing.
But, for me, it is important that my work eventually comes back to where I'm from. And even though this novel starts in the world of "Moby-Dick," it eventually comes out to Idaho, to the town that I live in now, in 1903.
And Chris and Jennifer, what about when you were writing "Dayswork"?
Jennifer Habel, co-author, "Dayswork": Well, I think what is behind "Dayswork" was nostalgia for western Massachusetts and interest in the area. We used to live in Amherst (for five years) and thought a lot about Emily Dickinson, of course, when we lived there.
But I didn't even know that Melville had written "Moby-Dick" in Pittsfield, and learned about that years later.
I imagined him in that landscape. As you say, he's writing this book about whaling, but he's writing it in the mountains. A lot of people talk about how a mountain that he saw out his window reminded him of a breaching whale, and he would look out at the snowy fields and be reminded of the ocean. And sometimes said that he would wake up in the night and look out his window and be reminded of looking out the porthole of a ship.
Another interesting thing is that "Moby-Dick" is mainly about men. You know, Ishmael is on a boat with a bunch of men, but Melville wrote the book in a house full of women, which was always of interest to me once I learned this fact about it.
Chris, I'm wondering if your relationship with Melville changed over the course of writing the book?
Christ Bachelder, co-author "Dayswork": Yeah, absolutely. His work had kind of threaded through my reading life and my teaching life, so I knew a bit. And when Jennifer got deeply involved in the research, then I fell into the vortex as well.
He became just an incredibly complicated figure to me, and not somebody that I can figure out or that I think we wanted to figure out. We just wanted to go kind of deep into the ocean of Melville. He's a very, very complicated person.
In the writing of "Wild and Distant Seas," I imagine you also experienced some inspiration and transformational process, Tara.
Tara Karr Roberts: Yeah, absolutely. I hadn't read "Moby-Dick" until I was in my 30s and had to read it to finish my master's degree. I was one of those people who had that perception of it as 800 pages of guys whaling. But I was very quickly surprised and delighted. And you know how weird it is and how funny it is and how mystical it is, but it leapt out that this is a novel about men. There are almost no women who speak in it.
And I attached to this character, the woman who speaks the most in "Moby-Dick" is an innkeeper. She's a slapstick character, a goofy woman that Ishmael and Queequeg encounter in an inn. And I liked the idea of following that thread and asking, you know, "What if Ishmael's recounting of this encounter is entirely wrong and he's missing the point?"
I didn't stay too close to "Moby-Dick" for too long in this novel, and that was on purpose. I enjoyed kind of paralleling it and playing with it, but I wanted to take it in its own direction and really make it a story about women.
Jennifer, I'm wondering, do you see "Moby-Dick" as a prerequisite for reading your book, or is it meant to draw someone in?
Jennifer Habel: I really hope it's not a prerequisite, and it has made us happy when people say, "Oh, I've never read 'Moby Dick,' but I still really enjoy this book and was drawn to it in in certain ways."
It doesn't matter even that this is Melville, which I know sounds paradoxical, but I think what we were very interested in was thinking about the role of the artist, the cost of making art. And what is the worth of art in relationship to the cost and pain of making it — and time?
Chris, your novel is contemporary. At what point did you decide to include a health crisis and make it central to the setting? And do you think that that's going to hold up to the test of time?
Christ Bachelder: You're talking about the pandemic angle of the novel?
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. I mean, that's where we were as writers, you know. And I think that as the form took us a while to figure out. But that was pretty central all along. And I think there's a sense in which our narrator is, you know, trapped at home and is going on an adventure.
I mean, the novel pits domesticity and adventure, and I think it's her way of conducting an audit of her own life and just setting out on the sea of Melville. We have these transatlantic rowers in our book, and I think Jennifer and I kind of thought of ourselves two in a boat rowing across Melville during this really just very strange time.
It certainly was. Tara, you had a similar post-pandemic release date on your novel. Did that impact your work?
Tara Karr Roberts: Oh, absolutely. I was in the process of really deep revisions in 2020. Like so many people, I was home with my children, and so much of this book is about motherhood and struggle between wanting to protect your children and not wanting to scare them.
The characters in this book, I think, struggle with feeling trapped and being overbearing, and I was certainly very much in that mindset of trying to figure out how to navigate this immense thing with kids at a really impressionable age. And they needed a lot, and I felt quite literally trapped with them sometimes. In some of the editing, I found things to dig deeper into because of the time that I spent with my husband and children all the time in 2020.
For the novel "Dayswork," Jennifer and Chris, did you also find that to be a similar case?
Jennifer Habel: In many ways, this book would not have been written without the pandemic, because we have both been each other's close readers and editors for many years, but never wrote together.
And it was being home together that led us on this path of collaborating. So, that was a really interesting and unexpected thing. And the book did sort of take over our home in many ways.
We worked in the dining room, had our materials all over the place. And our daughters, they would say that we "were doing Melville" — [that] was our phrase. They said, "Mom and dad are doing Melville again!"
Chris Bachelder: So, brunch is not going to be [on] time as brunch gets moved back and back. [laughing]
Yeah — just related to the pandemic — there's a sense in which she [the main character] caught something. Our narrator caught something during this time. You know, there's this idea of, you know, this dangerous thing out in the air. And there's a sense in which she's kind of been infected by Melville a little bit.