Unlike Larry Duberstein — who seems to have been steadily publishing a novel every couple of years since time began, according to his (self-published?) Wikipedia page, all of them praised immoderately by people we've never heard of — Herman Melville had a fabulous spurt of creativity in his forties, then went very quiet for the last thirty years of his life, settling down into the uneventful life of a New York customs officer, leaving us only the unfinished text of Billy Budd at his death.

The aim of this historical novel seems to be to examine that break in Melville's creative life, but it somehow gets rather lost on the way, leaving us with two disconnected portraits, one of them of Melville in New York in the 1880s flirting with a young widow, the other with Melville at Arrowhead around the time he was writing Moby-Dick, partying with his literary friends and rolling in the hay with a married neighbour. In a short epilogue we see him coming home from Bermuda on a steamship where he meets a young officer cadet who might — or might not — have been the inspiration for Billy.

The things that really do seem to have led to Melville's loss of confidence as a writer don't seem to get mentioned at all — the poor reviews of Pierre, health and financial problems and the disruption of the Civil War, to name but a few.

Duberman seems to be quite good at establishing characters and settings — this is his fifth novel, after all, he's had time to practice — but he never seems to develop them or use them to tell a story. And he's clearly not very much in tune with the nineteenth century, either in terms of language or of social detail. Melville notices Cora because she's in the habit of visiting (alone!!!) the same coffee house where he goes on his lunch break(!!). I kept expecting her to drain her decaf latte and get out her Powerbook... As for the pastiche Melvillese the narrator of the 1880s chapters is apt to lapse into, the less said the better. ( )