Review 469: Dayswork

Dayswork by Chris Bachelder
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

When I started this book, I was a skeptic, this is an usual style of book. There isn’t a plot really, the sentences on the page are mostly not grouped together into paragraphs, there is a lot of white space.

Many of the sentences are seemingly random bits of information, mainly about Herman Melville’s life, but then can go on tangents.

Also mixed in is the narrator with her family. They are under lock down during the early days, months, of the pandemic. She and her husband, along with their two daughters, are remotely working and going to school. Her husband is a creative writing professor, her job is not mentioned, but seems also to be a writer. She is the one obsessed with researching Melville, sharing much of what she finds with her husband, as he would enjoy it too.

So the book feels like non-fiction, the two writers of Dayswork are married and work in the same fields. They have a child, or children, I don’t know, only that they are parents. The few things I’ve looked up about Melville are true, so it makes me wonder why this is fiction. Perhaps it is easier to invent that pandemic life, the family quirks. But it makes me suspect validity for these interesting facts about these writers: Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Marilynne Robinson, along with all the others, such as The Biographer.

I did enjoy the book, I would call it an unusual biography of Herman Melville. I have read scantily little of his work, and now feel like attempting Moby Dick. His life was not a happy one, and his family suffered as well. Do I now want to read a real biography of Melville? Yes, a little, perhaps someday.