Chase Raynor
Contributing Writer
“All visible objects are but pasteboard masks.” – Captain Ahab
What were you doing during the pandemic? Studying, working remotely? During the chaos that was 2020, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel spent the time untangling the impossible history of one of America’s greatest writers Herman Melville. Bachelder is an accomplished novelist who was nominated for the National Book Award and has spent his years teaching in a multitude of universities, even at the Sewanee School of Letters. He is now an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati. His previous work includes Bear V. Shark: The Novel, Abbot Awaits, and his award-winning book The Throwback Special. His wife Habel is a poetry writer who has published collections of her poetry Good Reason and Book of Jane. The two co-authored this novel playing off experiences that they went through during the pandemic. Habel truly fell into the rabbit hole and Bachelder was a supportive figure who was there for her when it all became too much. The two toured the Sewanee campus with their new novel and held a Q&A that spoke about the process of cooperative writing within a family.
With a Bon Voyage, Dayswork begins. The narrator, a surrogate for Habel, is now languishing in her home. The pandemic slowly isolates the outside world and leaves her family tied together in the cabin fever of their home. A relatable premise takes a turn for the strange as the narrator begins to chart the career and life of American author Herman Melville. As she delves deeper into her subject she finds herself reflecting upon her life and her current predicament. Her past blends itself along with a history that she learns of Melville, his first home, his revision of Moby Dick, and his relationship with his friends, family, and neighbor Nathanial Hawthorne. Her quest to untangle the knot that is Melville leads her on a voyage through almost undocumented history and paints a confusing picture of the author as events unfold within the narrator’s mind. Written in poetic prose the book reads line by line each descriptive but channeling into the next, an anchor’s chain tied to some great secret sunken to the bottom of the ocean of history. Just like Ahab’s devoted fanaticism with the White Whale, our Narrator destructively throws herself into this writer’s mysterious past.
I took a great deal away from this reading, the contrast between the suburban lifestyle of the narrator and the deep rich history of Melville. The more the narrator reads about Melville the more the reader becomes engrossed in her journey for the concrete truth, but just as in our own lives, there is very little a string that can be pulled from the vast tapestry. The book plays with creative stress and the burdens of sacrificing the family for the art, burnout from within challenges Habel and brings a level of tension to her reality that had been building since the installment of the lockdown.
Readers can expect a delightfully intelligent novel that speaks to the creative in an empathetic but critical way in a realistic depiction of devotion to art and withstanding the burnout, a reflective journey that digs deep within the inner consciousness of artists and what drives their passions, and an enjoyably confusing dive into the life of Herman Melville.