The Passages of Herman Melville by Jay Parini

Jay Parini's last novel was The Last Station, about the final days of Tolstoy. How to follow up a novel about the writer of War and Peace? With a novel about the writer of Moby Dick. Tolstoy's life is better documented than Melville's, but this is a curse and a blessing – Parini can't know his subject as well, but this means there's more room for imagination. And happily, what we do know about Melville is packed with incident, the most interesting of which are his adventures on the high seas, something he later made much use of, but they're by no means the end of it.

Parini structures the book as a dual narrative, with one strand straightforward biographical fiction, and one narrated by his wife, in his later, less adventurous, years. Parini can't resist the occasional knowing reference to famous Melville lines (the author does say 'Call me Herman', for example), which is slightly annoying. His Melville is also, interestingly, attracted to men at points, which does actually have some basis in the available evidence of the author's life. It's an odd book which will appeal to Melville readers, but has limited appeal for anyone else. [Ryan Agee]