Despite its initially disappointing reception in 1851, Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” eventually earned a place in the American literary canon, leading to a tidal wave of biographies, doctoral theses, and spinoffs. The latest is Tara Karr Roberts’ beautifully conceived debut novel, “Wild and Distant Seas,” which deserves a prime spot on the shelf of Melvilleana.
Neither prequel nor sequel, “Wild and Distant Seas” – like Sena Jeter Naslund’s 1999 novel “Ahab’s Wife” – is an inventive, atmospheric, female-centric story spun from a minor character in “Moby-Dick.”
It’s unlikely that readers will remember Mrs. Hosea Hussey, who, in her husband’s absence, serves Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, and his sidekick, Queequeg, some of her “surpassingly excellent” chowder before putting them up at the Try Pots Inn in Nantucket, Massachusetts, the “fishiest of all fishy places,” as Melville describes it.
“Wild and Distant Seas” begins in Nantucket in 1849, two years before the publication of Melville’s masterpiece. As in “Moby-Dick,” Ishmael and Queequeg are preparing to set sail with Captain Ahab on the Pequod for his maniacal pursuit of the great white sperm whale that bit off his leg on the ship’s previous voyage. They don’t hang around long in Roberts’ novel, but Ishmael’s sojourn at the inn changes the course of the widowed proprietress’ life – and is crucial to Roberts’ ingeniously constructed story.
The novel’s central conceit is that Ishmael was not just the sole survivor of the Pequod’s ill-fated voyage but also the man who actually wrote “Moby-Dick.”
The first of the novel’s four narrators, Evangeline Hussey, introduces him with the line: “He said I should call him Ishmael,” a locution that echoes one of the most famous opening lines in all literature, but also suggests that the name Ishmael itself might be a pseudonym.
It’s an understatement to say that Roberts fleshes out Mrs. Hussey’s character: She invents not just a first name for her, but also a backstory and a future. Evangeline’s legacy comes to include a daughter, a granddaughter, and a great-granddaughter – all of whom, for reasons I’ll leave to the reader to discover, become as obsessed with finding Ishmael as Ahab was with tracking down Moby-Dick.
“Wild and Distant Seas” takes its title from Melville’s description of Moby-Dick’s habitat. Like whales, Roberts’ novel traverses great distances, following its four generations of resolute women as they strive to take the helm of their lives. All four are helped in their navigations by an unusual, supernatural ability to see beneath the surface of others’ thoughts and movements.
The women’s successive quests send this stirring epic around the globe. Roberts’ characters land in the offices of a literary magazine in Boston that serializes Ishmael’s sea tales; a convent school for orphaned girls in Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil; and an apartment in Florence, Italy. Before circling back to Nantucket in 1905, the story takes us to Moscow, Idaho, Roberts’ hometown.
A pertinent question regarding historical fiction is its contemporary relevance. Why did the author choose to write this story now? The answer – in novels that include not just “Wild and Distant Seas” but also Alice McDermott’s “Absolution,” Zadie Smith’s “The Fraud,” and Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray’s “The Personal Librarian” – is to move marginalized female characters into the light to provide new perspective on the past.
Roberts’ novel features a diverse cast of self-sufficient women who offer advice to daughters and friends about how to handle men who patronize or belittle them. Evangeline’s daughter Rachel writes, “My mother had taught me to look a man in the eyes when I needed something from him. She said it frightened them.”
A neighbor in Idaho counsels Evangeline’s teenage great-granddaughter: “What I’m trying to tell you, Miss Sweet, is that if a woman wants a thing of her own in this world, she’s got to work for it. … But she’d better be sure it’s worth the work.”
There are also plenty of supportive, thoughtful men in the novel. Young Ishmael is described as tender, restless, and sweet, while Rachel’s kind husband is actually named Sweet. There’s a nasty bishop, but there’s also a lovely old priest who respects his local mother superior as an equal.
The seas aren’t all that’s stormy, wild, and distant. Daughters chafe at their mothers’ overprotectiveness and, driven to forge their own paths, provoke pain as they break away. Many characters hold secrets that invariably cause troubles. If they’re attentive, they learn that “truth is, indeed, a slippery fish,” and that “seeing does not always mean knowing … [or] understanding.” For that, they must ask questions, listen, and wait.
In describing Ishmael’s magazine stories, which we recognize as parts of “Moby-Dick,” Rachel says that “the prose was simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting.”
There’s nothing exhausting about “Wild and Distant Seas.”