The climactic pages, concentrated on Ahab’s increasing monomania and Una’s realization that he’s lost to her, vibrate with tragic intensity. Then Una returns to Kentucky, thence back east (Nantucket), where her restless intellect involves her with New England’s ruling intellectual elite (including Transcendentalist icon Margaret Fuller) and the burgeoning abolitionist movement. Naslund’s flexible and fascinating narrative then leaps from Una’s ordeal (both her baby and her beloved mother die) and an inspiring new friendship-backward, to the story of her upbringing among relatives who tend a New England lighthouse, apprenticeship at sea disguised as a cabin boy, conflicted first marriage to an increasingly deranged husband, and eventual union with the brooding Ahab, whom even his young wife’s resourceful love cannot deflect him from his vengeful pursuit of the white whale he imagines Evil Incarnate. The protagonist, and primary narrator, is Una Spenser (whose bookish mother named her after the heroine of The Faerie Queene), whom we first meet in her native Kentucky, where she’s returned to give birth to her first child’sired by her second husband: middle-aged Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod.
571, etc.) prepares us for this extraordinary tale: a ravishingly detailed re-creation of the worlds of 19th-century antebellum America and of Melville’s seminal Moby Dick. Nothing in Naslund’s previous fiction (The Disobedience of Water, p.
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