Melville probably would have found Naslund's inversion of his work anathema: not only did he basically exclude women from the decks of his fiction, he could barely tolerate the thought of them reading his books.
Of ''Moby-Dick'' Naslund lays a cool hand, as if to say: ''There, there. Kind should not, however, blind one to the fact that she is, in the most nonaggressive way, rewriting American history, revising American literature and critiquing traditional masculinity. That Naslund is unstintingly reasonable, empathetic and Naslund, Ahab-like, has taken on an overwhelming quarry in pursuing Melville, but, true to her maternal, liberal philosophy, she does not harpoon the master so much as harness his force to her own. Is as much a believer in social justice as the famous hero is in vengeance. That world is a looking-glass version of Melville's fictional seafaring one, ruled by compassion as the other is by obsession, with a heroine who ''Ahab's Wife,'' Sena Jeter Naslund has taken less than a paragraph's worth of references to the captain's young wife from Herman Melville's ''Moby-Dick'' andįashioned from this slender rib not only a woman but an entire world. Ow one feels about this book depends on how seriously one takes the pursuit of happiness - as opposed to, say, the pursuit of a large white whale. According to his wife, Ahab was a decent guy (and good in bed) until that whale came along.
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