Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer by Sena Jeter Naslund

Social and cultural details texture the lengthy, episodic, discursive narrative. Unitarianism and Universalism are two of the religions she investigates other ''dark issues of our time'' include slavery, and the position of women. But Naslund also endows her with restlessness, rash impetuosity and a refreshing skepticism about traditional religion, qualities that humanize what verges on an idealized personality, and that motivate Una's search for spiritual sustenance. Una is an enchanting protagonist: intellectually curious, sensitive, imaginative and kind. Una's later marriage to Ahab-a passionate and intellectually satisfying relationship-the loss of her mother and her newborn son in one night, and her life as a rich woman in Nantucket are further developments in a plot teeming with arresting events and provocative ideas. These events-recounted in stately prose nicely dotted with literary allusions-take the reader only through the first quarter of the book. Rescued, Una is wed to one of the young men by the captain of the Pequod, handsome, commanding Ahab, who has not as yet met the white whale that will be his destiny. Una and two young men who love her are the only survivors of a group set adrift in an open boat, but the dark secret of their cannibalism will leave its mark.

When she is 16-disguised as a boy-she runs off to sea aboard a whaler, which sinks after being rammed by its quarry. At age 12, Una escapes her religiously obsessed father in rural Kentucky to live with relatives in a lighthouse off New Bedford, Mass. Naslund's inspiration, based on one reference in Moby-Dick, may not satisfy aficonados of Melville's dense, richly symbolic masterpiece, but it should please most other readers with its suspenseful, affecting, historically accurate and seductive narrative. ''Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last,'' says Una Spenser, the eponymous narrator, in the first sentence of this deliciously old-fashioned bildungsroman, adventure story and romance.

Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer by Sena Jeter Naslund