Pierre has all the markings of an awful book--flat characters, overblown writing, shameless melodrama. So why is it such a masterpiece? Melville seems to have put all of himself into this work--his despair, his religious doubts, his understanding of human psychology--with an intensity that makes the usual standards of plot, style and character obsolete. The analysis of Pierre's mother as she turns on her husband/son and Melville's agonizing descriptions of the writing process were two of the book's highlights for me. The Beats loved Pierre--maybe they saw a model for their own art, where elegance takes a back seat to energy. The novel was a critical disaster at the time, but look where it ranks on amazon 150 years later. I hope Melville's somewhere watching.

This novel, which I believe to be the greatest ever written by an American, is far too complex and profound to be neatly summarized here. It relates the story of Pierre, a young man born into American high society in the late 19th century, who gradually discovers that his beloved family and society are in reality profoundly false and corrupt. The analysis of this corruption in the novel is centered in the fact that Pierre's deceased and revered father has an unacknowledged, abandoned daughter whose existence Pierre discovers. Pierre attempts to stand up against this corruption and from there the unbreakable threads unwind steadily into tragedy. This is no melodrama or romantic fantasy, it is tragedy as objective and profound as anything created by Aeschylus or Sophocles. It is more bold and profound than anything ever conceived by Melville's contemporary, Hawthorne. But it connects Hawthorne with the Greeks in a most unexpected way: Pierre, or The Ambiguities is the only novel I know of that could be called an authentic Christian trgedy. What I mean is that Melville presents Pierre to us deliberately in a light that recalls classical tragedy all the way back to its mythological roots. He compares Pierre with the rebel, earth-born, giant, Enceladus, brother of the Titans, who perished in his struggle against the transcendent tyranny of Zeus. But though a giant, Enceladus was a mortal who could not overcome corrupt divine power. And early in the novel, in the first chapter, long before we are introduced to the comparison with Enceladus, Melville tells the reader clearly, even while he so beautifully describes the beauty of Pierre and his fiancee, Lucy, that we are dealing with a story of tragic fate, of doomed mortality colliding with divinity: Nemo contra Deum nisi Deus ipse ( No one against the Gods unless a God himself.) But the God that Pierre collides with is not Zeus, but the inscrutable Christian God who seemingly inspires him. The amazing ambiguity here is that it is by trying to be a Christian that Pierre, a beautiful, but mere, mortal, is brought relentlessly to his destruction. Why? For what possible purpose?
One of the most impressive and profound elements of this story is Pierre's relationship with his fiancee, Lucy, and his discovered sister, Isabel. Both of these amazing females, though real individuals, seem to be countering reflections of Pierre's tormented soul, one bright and glorious, the other dark and mysterious, both essential and necessary. What is the answer? What resolution can there be? What is the nature of this mortal? And of this God whose only voice is silence?
If you have not read Pierre, then you have not experienced the deepest places that American ficion has ever gone. Melville was ostracized and virtually exiled for writing Pierre. It went too far, too deep. America has never forgiven him, has never given him his rightful place, but he was and remains America's greatest artist.

I think of two points here than which nothing is more obvious.
1. This novel about a young man from high American society in the late 19th century who gradually discovers the spiritual corruption of his family, his society and of all ordinary human consciousness is a work of genius that remains more modern, more penetrating of frontiers, and more bold in form and content than any American novel before it or after it. It is in that small group of the most profound novels ever created.

2.America has never even begun to really absorb and integrate the genius of Melville, especially as it is manifested in this novel. Americans have so much time and opportunity to cultivate artistic sensitivity, but mostly they choose not to. Most 'educated' Americans have no familiarity with this novel. And this is not an accident. America has always been afraid of Melville, has rejected him, and turned him into a harmless museum-piece, a distinguished man of letters, but he is in reality America's horned black sheep, it's enfant terrible. Pierre is safely put away on dusty library shelves. But this book still burns with prophetic energy and one day the truth of its fire will burn through the walls that enclose it.
Stars? I would give this book enough stars too fill the sky.
"Enter this enchanted wood ye who dare."

I first read Moby Dick; or The Whale over thirty years ago and I didn't understand it. I thought I was reading a sea adventure, like Westward Ho! or Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym. In fact, it did start out like an adventure story but after twenty chapters or so, things began to get strange. I knew I was in deep water. It was rough, it seemed disjointed, there were lengthy passages that seemed like interruptions to the story, the language was odd and difficult, and often it was just downright bizarre. I plodded through it, some of it I liked, but I believe I was glad when it ended. I knew I was missing something and I understood that it was in me! It wasn't the book; it was manifestly a great book, but I hadn't the knowledge of literature or experience to understand it.

I read it again a few years later. I don't remember what I thought of it. The third time I read it, it was hilarious; parts of it made me laugh out loud! I was amazed at all the puns Melville used, and the crazy characters, and quirky dialog. The fourth or fifth reading, it was finally that adventure story I wanted in the first place. I've read Moby Dick more times than I've counted, more often than any other book. At some point I began to get the symbolism. Somewhere along the line I could see the structure. It's been funny, awesome, exciting, weird, religious, overwhelming and inspiring. It's made my hair stand on end...

Now, when I get near the end I slow down. I go back and reread the chapters about killing the whale, and cutting him up, and boiling him down. Or about the right whale's head versus the sperm whale's. I want to get to The Chase but I want to put it off. I draw Queequeg with his tattoos in the oval of a dollar bill. I take a flask with Starbuck and a Decanter with Flask. Listen to The Symphony and smell The Try-Works. Stubb's Supper on The Cabin Table is a noble dish, but what is a Gam? Heads or Tails, it's a Leg and Arm. I get my Bible and read about Rachel and Jonah. Ahab would Delight in that; he's a wonderful old man. For a Doubloon he'd play King Lear! What if Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of The Whale? Would Fedallah blind Ishmael with a harpoon, or would The Pequod weave flowers in The Virgin's hair?

Now I know. To say you understand Moby Dick is a lie. It is not a plain thing, but one of the knottiest of all. No one understands it. The best you can hope to do is come to terms with it. Grapple with it. Read it and read it and study the literature around it. Melville didn't understand it. He set out to write another didactic adventure/travelogue with some satire thrown in. He needed another success like Typee or Omoo. He needed some money. He wrote for five or six months and had it nearly finished. And then things began to get strange. A fire deep inside fret his mind like some cosmic boil and came to a head bursting words on the page like splashes of burning metal. He worked with the point of red-hot harpoon and spent a year forging his curious adventure into a bloody ride to hell and back. "...what in the world is equal to it?"

Moby Dick is a masterpiece of literature, the great American novel. Nothing else Melville wrote is even in the water with it, but Steinbeck can't touch it, and no giant's shoulders would let Faulkner wade near it. Melville, The pale Usher, warned the timid: "...don't you read it, ...it is by no means the sort of book for you. ...It is... of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it. Warn all gentle fastidious people from so much as peeping into the book..." But I say if you've never read it, read it now. If you've read it before, read it again. Think Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Goethe, and The Bible. If you understand it, think again.

It's always dangerous to label a book as a "masterpiece": that word seems to scare away most readers and distances everyone from the substance of the book itself. Still, I'm going to say that this is the Greatest American Novel because I really think that it is--after having read it myself.

Honestly, Moby Dick IS long and looping, shooting off in random digressions as Ishmael waxes philosophical or explains a whale's anatomy or gives the ingredients for Nantucket clam chowder--and that's exactly what I love about it. This is not a neat novel: Melville refused to conform to anyone else's conventions. There is so much in Moby Dick that you can enjoy it on so many completely different levels: you can read it as a Biblical-Shakespearean-level epic tragedy, as a canonical part of 19th Century philosophy, as a gothic whaling adventure story, or almost anything else. Look at all the lowbrow humor. And I'm sorry, but Ishmael is simply one of the most likable and engaging narrators of all time.

A lot of academics love Moby Dick because academics tend to have good taste in literature. But the book itself takes you about as far from academia as any book written--as Ishmael himself says, "A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard." Take that advice and forget what others say about it, and just experience Moby Dick for yourself.

Why review Moby Dick? Hasn't enough been said?

If you've not read this novel yet, then obviously not. Don't miss it.

The average reader today will be put off by what seems to be a laborious 19th Century style. Long words are assembled into long sentences, there's not always a lot of dialogue, and not a single glib pop culture reference. Surely a dated work.

Here are a few secrets -- you won't find these heavily discussed -- to help you read this novel:

1) It's the first modernist work. Yes, though it looks old-fashioned, "Moby Dick" is anything but. The whole novel is conscious of the fact that it's a novel -- Melville assembles bits of other works (real or imagined) and plays with form in a way we normally think of as the contribution of later writers.

2) It's got rhythm. The book moves from action piece to digression back to action in a regular pattern. The tempo of the novel itself suggests the motion of a ship on the sea. So when you're reading one of the long digressive passages, remember that it's just there to rest you up.

3) It's funny. Why doesn't anyone mention this? It's true the book concerns some serious themes -- it's not just a whaling novel -- but Melville has a sense of humor. The whole of the novel is over the top with solemnity and scholarliness. If you think he's entirely serious, you're being far too literal minded.

So take your time, don't be put off. Melville has an odd style, but once you recognize that it's deliberate, you'll see he has a sense of playfulness. Enjoy.

William Spanos has his good moments, but you won't find any of them in this book. Wow, can you say BAD?

First of all, you can't read Spanos without a deep knowledge of the work of Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida. But once you've overcome that hurdle, you'll find that this book is far more boring than anything Melville ever wrote, and not particularly intelligent.

What is appalling is Spanos's overwhelming arrogance. For years, Spanos has been writing about the Vietnam War as an event that delegitimizes the discourses associated with the idea of America and of the triumph of democracy. Now he's arguing that contemporary studies of Melville and his Moby-Dick are deeply implicated in a rush to bury the event of the Vietnam War.

COME ON!

I don't just say that because it sounds dumb. I say that because it IS dumb. Spanos essentially ignores the important points of the book and focuses on individual phrases that he says modern literary critics have forgotten. Why have they forgotten them? Because they're insignificant, dispersed, and totally unimportant. For example, Spanos takes one minor passage in which Ishmael reflects on the sermon and argues that it proves that Melville is a prototypical postmodern writer (and thus anti-Vietnam... another faulty assumption Spanos makes) AND that it proves that Melville doesn't believe in symbolism.

EXCUSE ME? MELVILLE DOESN'T BELIEVE IN SYMBOLISM?

I wonder whether Spanos has an understanding of Moby-Dick that even rivals that of Cliff's Notes. It doesn't take an intelligent person to see symbolism in Moby-Dick. But does Spanos see it? Nope.

Even if we buy that Melville doesn't believe in symbolism and is a postmodern writer, what does that have to do with Vietnam? This problem looms over the book, and you'll have to look to HEIDEGGER AND CRITICISM (1993) for an answer. Essentially Spanos thinks that anything remotely associated with humanism or America in general is complicit with violence like the violence we saw in Vietnam. So being a post-humanist means not being complicit with the violence of Vietnam. So he goes on to say that Melville (in a theoretical way) predicted the Vietnam War and delegitimized the discourses enabling it.

I almost wanted to put down the book when I read that. This is academic writing it its most ridiculously stupid. Ridiculously stupid.