Ahab's Wife
Simon & Schuster Audio, abridged, $25
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Howard Bahr
Children's Authors
Arlene Alda |
INTERVIEW BY L. ELISABETH BEATTIE
Three months and a 36-city book tour later, Sena Jeter Naslund, author of the end-of-millennium blockbuster, Ahab's Wife, is ready for a rest. She's ready to step back a bit from the standing-room-only crowds that have rushed her from Nantucket to Nashville -- and from the East Coast to the West -- to reflect on the public's overwhelmingly positive response to her fifth and most popular book. It's fascinated her, Naslund says, to find that her most favorable critical comments have come from men and women who have not read or who have hated reading Moby-Dick, as well as from Melville scholars and aficionados. And the author agrees that her range of readers may complement the almost-symphonic scope of her literary composition, as Naslund's interest in musical scores, shaped in her childhood, still structures her thinking. "As a young girl I would sit and listen as my mother practiced the piano for several hours each day. Mostly, she played the three B's: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms," Naslund says, "but one of my favorites was the Chopin etude nicknamed 'The Ocean.'" In fact, while growing up in Alabama, Naslund assumed her own career would be that of a musician. As a teenager she played the cello in the Birmingham Youth and Alabama Pops orchestras. But when Naslund chose a college, she also committed to the creative passion she would pursue for life. Instead of accepting the scholarship to study cello offered her by The University of Alabama, Naslund enrolled in Birmingham-Southern College to study -- eventually -- writing. "I realized that the range of effects I could achieve on the cello were too narrow," she recalls, "so I turned to writing for a broader perspective."
Naslund continues by pointing out the parallels between her work and the writing of her literary hero, Charles Dickens. "Dickens," she says, "gave the following advice to the writer Wilkie Collins: 'Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, and make 'em wait.' I strive for my plots to possess narrative lines that move forward, like lines in music, lines that keep their listeners waiting for and wanting resolutions. At the same time," she adds, "I think it's vital for many lines to develop at once, as in a fugue, so that when one narrative line resolves itself, another is already developing." An example Naslund cites in Ahab's Wife is the scene in which Una struggles to survive in an open boat at sea after her whaling ship has been sunk. The primary question in that passage is whether Una's food and water will last. But simultaneously, Naslund notes, Una is evaluating the behavior of the people around her, just as she is assessing her own spiritual position. Naslund comments, "I've been touched by the women who have thanked me for writing this novel. These women from all walks of life who, apparently, embrace many different belief systems, all identify with Una's courage." The author adds that another part of the novel readers have appreciated is the story of Susan, the escaped slave, who makes the surprising decision to return to the South because she values family more than freedom, unlike Toni Morrison's Sethe in Beloved, who murders her child so the child will not live as a slave. "To tell you the truth," Naslund says, "I didn't know Susan would return to the South. As a matter of fact, most of this novel surprised me as I wrote it, although from the moment I conceived the book, the novel's first sentence -- "Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last"-lodged itself in my head. At the same instant that sentence came to me, I had a vision of a woman on a widow's walk. She was looking out to sea at night, hoping to see her husband's whaling ship returning with its try -- works blazing. But she realizes he's not coming home, so she stops looking out and starts looking up at the starry sky. Thus begins her own spiritual quest as she considers her place in the universe." Asked how writing and publishing Ahab's Wife has defined her own authorial quest, Naslund replies, "Writing the book was an enjoyable process -- both the two years it took to write the first draft of the novel and the two years it took to revise the book from beginning to end four times. The entire experience increased my confidence in myself as a writer. When I began writing Ahab's Wife, I only hoped somebody would want to publish it. When I finished the book, I found that six major publishing houses very much wanted to do so. When Book-of-the-Month Club chose Ahab's Wife as a main selection this fall, I felt I had achieved my old dream of being like Dickens -- of garnering wide popular appeal while satisfying critics in search of literary merit." Yet Naslund, who has managed to juggle her vocation as a writer and as editor of the national literary journal, The Louisville Review, with her career as an English professor at both The University of Louisville and with Vermont College's M.F.A. in Writing program, realizes she can neither rest nor reflect too long. Her next novel -- "a somewhat autobiographical book based on civil rights issues in Birmingham" -- is already taking shape in her head. She's eager, she says, to capture on her computer screen the vivid images clamoring to be composed. She's curious, she insists, to see where her narrative lines will lead her.
L. Elisabeth Beattie, an associate professor of English at Midway College, recently published her third book, Conversations with Kentucky Writers II.
Author photo by Sigrid Estrada.
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Indeed, more than a few critics have described Ahab's Wife as a novel of epic scope, as a true American saga. "Often in music there is an alternation between fast and slow and joyful and sorrowful, so there's an ebb and flow to the emotional structure," Naslund says. "Such a compositional structure is significant in Ahab's Wife. My character, Una, experiences great traumas as well as moments of great fulfillment."