Ahab's Wife: Or, The Star-Gazer: A Novel
by Sena Jeter Naslund
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Book Summary Information
Author: Sena Jeter NaslundEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2000-10-01
ISBN: 1865082767
Number of pages: 688
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Book Reviews of Ahab's Wife: Or, The Star-Gazer: A Novel
Book Review: A little girl's tea party, with mud pies
Summary: 1 Stars
Ahab's Wife: Or, The Star-Gazer: A Novel of Diet-Soda Swill
Sadly, Naslund's exquisitely beautiful imagery is just so much compensation for something more lacking than lack of character development. Here all potential "characters" are suborned to be one-dimensional instruments for Naslund's neediness--her need to have a world the way she wants a world to be (nice), when she doesn't like this one. This is a little girl's tea party. 203 pages in, only one character was other than, "kind," or "gentle," or "nice," and of the most liberal and flavorless social attitudes. That one character is Una's father, but underneath Naslund's notion of Bible toters, he's nice too. Naslund just uses him and his mild violence to rather trivially discuss fundamentalism, but then she's done, so she has his "nice" conscience conveniently suicide himself out of the story. Simpering pap.
Some Old-Testament scribe tried to tell writers that if they wanted to play god, they had to breath life into their clay. At the lighthouse, Una and her young cousin make mud pies, as Naslund makes characters that taste only of mud.
Una's uncle "Torchy" has to be the singularly least developed character in all of Western literature. For a hundred pages he wanders around a lighthouse with red hair, saying kind things. Una also has a nice aunt, a nice cousin, meets two nice young men, signs on to a whaling ship that serves nice food and has nice people. This is the kind of wish-fullfillment fantasy I'd expect from someone who was desperately trying to live in a fantasy world where everyone is (gawd, I hate this word) "nice." Such avoidance is found in abuse servivors (and if this is her case, Naslund deserves sympathy) and in those persons who are abberantly mild of nature, in which case she deserves hormone supplements. In either case, the book is more a portrayal of Naslund's wishfulness than a novel.
The last line here encapsulates Naslund's wish fulfillment fantasy, and perhaps reflects some other, thinly disguised void from her family history, in which case Ahab's Wife becomes a sort of a crying in public: "I thought of my searching in Captain Fry's blue eyes--steady, penetrant. Kind. What had I thought I saw? All reflective in my hammock, I knew at once. I had seen the eyes of a true father." The whole damn thing is Naslund's fantasy search for a father, the way she wants a father to be, a fantasy of a world of people how she wants them to be, indicating she doesn't like people how we are, and perhaps also a search for the more heavenly father she was promised by Christianity, embodied by Una's father, the insipid image she wants but is too smart to be able to believe in, so that it is not Una's father that slaps her face for not believing, but Naslund's rationality preventing her from believing the drivel she so wants and then foists upon us, her own rationality slapping Naslund with the fact that she, as her book, though flowery, will always be empty.
But, paraphrased from Abe, "Them that like this sort of thing will like this sort of thing." Not me.
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