\u201cCall me Herman.\u201d Such a commandment could come from only one writer, Herman Melville, who stands at the center of Fres\u00e1n\u2019s narrative. Occupying much of that space, too, albeit in sometimes spectral form, is Melville\u2019s father, Allan Melvill (the -e a typo that his son, the victim of a bureaucrat\u2019s pen, stuck with, even as, later in the novel, he notes ruefully that his obituary in Harper\u2019s Monthly Magazine, where several of his stories appeared, will render his name as Henry). Allan, born to a Scottish family famed for \u201cswords and shields and maces brandished in the name of savage monarchs whose castles were just giant stones,\u201d is frequently revisited at a climacteric moment, when, desperately poor, he walks across an iced-over Hudson River to return to his starving family. It\u2019s an image that haunts the grown-up Herman, who, Fres\u00e1n conjectures, cast his father as a confidence man on a paddle wheeler, a lowly sailor on a whaling ship, an indifferent clerk who refuses to do his job. \u201cIt turns out to be almost as exhausting and distressing to trace his downward spiral as, I suppose, it was for my father to know himself pursued and persecuted,\u201d Herman sighs. Fres\u00e1n imagines Melville\u2019s life as a quiet repudiation of his father\u2019s, who was so proud that he refused to allow his wife, Herman\u2019s mother, to borrow money from her aristocratic family. In the end, though, Allan accompanies his son\u2019s every waking moment and haunts his dreams: \u201cThe ice is the unknown,\u201d Herman, that great explorer of mysterious places and mores, says. Fres\u00e1n\u2019s fictional evocation of Melville\u2019s youth is as convincingly realized as Frederick Busch\u2019s The Night Inspector (2000), which neatly bookends it.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cCall me Herman.\u201d Such a commandment could come from only one writer, Herman Melville, who stands at the center of Fres\u00e1n\u2019s narrative. Occupying much of that space, too, albeit in sometimes spectral form, is Melville\u2019s father, Allan Melvill (the -e a typo that his son, the victim of a bureaucrat\u2019s pen, stuck with, even as, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":610,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}