Revisionist Overload

This is the first of the novels that Emily left me that I won't give two thumbs up to Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund. (I guess I might as well admit it straight up, I have never read Moby Dick.) The conceit of this story is to portray Ahab's wife as leading a life as adventuresome as the Captain's.

Using Pamuk's theories of what a reader expects from fiction, although it is easy to envision Una's worlds, a rural farm in Kentucky, her early adolescence with her kin tending a light house, and her eventual life as a Nantucket widow, Naslund stretches the reader's willingness to suspend belief too far, incessantly playing American history six degrees of separation. How could one woman meet Maria Mitchell, Margaret Sanger, Emerson, Frederick Douglas, and Henry James. How could she, given her point in history, have become a runaway cabin boy on a whaler and survive a wreck by becoming a cannibal? How could she have a Little Eva type experience with a runaway slave and end up trusting her bounty hunter, a dwarf, to lead her out of Kentucky back to New England?

Despite the wifely title, this is not a love story or a story about passion. Una is "married" three times. The first time is to one of the two young men who had come to the light house to upgrade the mirrors who just happen to be serving on the same whaler as she. This time she is "married" to Kit by Captain Ahab. Kit eventually loses his sanity (his effects from eating human flesh) and runs off to the Indian frontier. Ahab then conveniently "unmarries" her and marries her all in one ceremony. Finally years after Moby Dick prevails, Una lives with, yes, you guessed it, Ishmael. If credibility has not yet been blown, add in homosexuality and the use of scrimshaw as a tool to relieve the sexual tensions of the captains' wives during the years they are off to sea.
Populated with such caricatures rather than characters, the novel becomes a garish exaggeration of pre-Civil War America.

Back to Pamuk's influence ... and I cannot yet, if ever, clarify in my mind what is the central focus of Naslund's story. Maybe she is trying to achieve equal time for feminine heroes, as thinkers, scientists, abolitionists and everyday women. But even the real heroines' successes read like fables when set in a world where all the happenings seem contrived.