BookBrowse Reviews Dayswork by Chris Bachelder, Jennifer Habel

Confession time: even though I spent years studying English literature, even though I lived in Massachusetts for twenty years and knew people who religiously attended its annual live reading at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, I've never read what many regard as the quintessential American novel: Moby-Dick. I'm not sure if I've been deterred by its length, or its weighty reputation, or just all that talk of harpooning. My husband, on the other hand, decided to tackle Moby-Dick as a pandemic project, immersing himself in a life on the open sea just as we were feeling pretty trapped indoors.

In Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel's collaboratively written novel Dayswork, Moby-Dick becomes a bit of a pandemic project as well. Or rather, its author, Herman Melville, becomes an object of research, and consideration, and fascination, and perhaps mild obsession, on the part of the unnamed ...