Books: Ishmael, Meet Jane Eyre

You step aboard the vaulting epic Ahab's Wife (Morrow; 668 pages; $28), by Sena Jeter Naslund, and almost instantly you are in New England in 1840, a charged, visionary realm atremble with religious longings and debate. Privets are shaped like sperm whales. Inns are kept by witches. Women ask each other in passing, "What do you think of the afterlife?" Your guide through this God-racked wilderness is a classically captivating heroine, Una Spenser, drawn equally to storms and speculations.

We follow this spirited skeptic as she looks at lightning head on (in a lighthouse), escapes to sea on a whaling ship (dressed, in Shakespearean fashion, as a boy) and takes Captain Ahab (who has the "mien of a weathered god") to her bed. Naslund is helping us, of course, to see the all-male world of Moby Dick through more compassionate eyes, and its protagonist as he might be glimpsed through "pity's tears." Yet what is remarkable here is not the revisionism. Naslund, author of four much smaller works of fiction, actually matches the master, Melville, in all his unearthly poetry and unworldly philosophizing, following him not just into the details of harpooning and coffin-shaped beds, but also into bloodshed and delirium and diabolism. "Blast winds! and spank these sails as though they were the flanks of horses," cries her Ahab, and we shiver anew as we recall that, one paragraph earlier, Una has found in him a "soft glowing."

The narrator, obviously something more than the "sweet, resigned" wife that Melville hardly mentions, belongs to a world in which an intelligent woman's best friends might seem to be Wordsworth and Shakespeare and Keats; her story reads as if one of the Bronte sisters had gone off whaling. Yet for all the literary grandeur, much of the book possesses the reader like an unholy fever. A woman walks through the mist in a wolf-trimmed cloak. A madman cries, "Now we eat our fingernails. Now the spiny stars." Naslund writes with the fearlessness of her protagonist.

When, in its final passage, Ahab's Wife leaves Melville for dry land, it loses some of its fire; channeling her male precursor is what quickens Naslund into incandescence. By then, however, the soul has been shaken many times over.

--By Pico Iyer