Writing from inside the pandemic, husband and wife team Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel have novelized the ecosystem of a marriage in which both partners are obsessed with the same book. The book is Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Dayswork, published this month, **gives the reader a close look at how research at home can happen, the dailyness of reading, writing, and thinking, and a careful reconsideration of what it means to write a novel with another novel as an intertext.
Dayswork is a book about relationships, notably Melville’s friendship with Nathanial Hawthorne, second only to Melville’s relationship with his wife. There is evidence that Herman Melville was very likely mentally ill and prone to violence. Melville’s wife, Elizabeth Shaw Melville, called Lizzie, had the opportunity to leave him (and the support of her family) but she did not. The writer Elizabeth Hardwick wrote a biography of Herman Melville that the authors quote from. Hardwick was married to the famous poet Robert Lowell who was also mentally ill and prone to violence. While I’ve known about Elizabeth Shaw Melville and I love the work of Elizabeth Hardwick, I’ve never connected them in the way this book compels me to.
For the past ten years I’ve been tweeting a line a day from Moby-Dick, in order. Because of this obsessive project, I’m included in the magical swirl of Dayswork. When Chris Bachelder initially emailed me about my Moby-Dick tweets, I answered his questions as honestly as possible, hoping I could be helpful, but as I am not a Melville scholar, I doubted my words could be of use. By the time I reached the part of the book where I am mentioned, my head was swimming with all sorts of new ideas and new connections between writers I think about often (notably Melville, Hawthorne, and Hardwick) and writers I had no idea were connected with or had written about Moby-Dick.
The experimental prose style of Dayswork (fragments, a myriad of references to the past and present, and numerous discursive interludes) lends itself to questioning. Whatever you think you know about Moby-Dick, this book will challenge it, will add layers of questions, will make you see yourself as part of the vast web of Moby-Dick readers.
Rena J. Mosteirin wrote Experiment 116 (Counterpath press, 2021), Half-Fabulous Whales (Little Dipper, 2019) and Nick Trail’s Thumb (Kore Press, 2008). She is the co-author of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019) an academic and poetic exploration of the Apollo 11 guidance computer code. Mosteirin is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine, teaches creative writing workshops at Dartmouth College and owns Left Bank Books, a used bookstore in Hanover.