Israel Potter: His 50 Years of Exile (Library of Essential Reading) Book

This is a really great novel that, for some reason, few people seem to know about. A picaresque comic romp based on the dubious biography of a self-proclaimed veteran of the battle of Bunker Hill, it starts off rather slowly. However, when Melville departs from the text of his source material the book really comes to life. Potter's adventures are fast paced and peopled with many historical figures of the time (think of Forest Gump set in 1776), making the story appealing to anyone who simply wants to be entertained, yet there is a great deal of art in the book as well. Offsetting the light-hearted tone are scenes of shocking violence presented in a dispassionate voice and depicted with such visual clarity that they would not be out of place in Blood Meridian, and a balance between the serious and the silly somehow is achieved. For readers who find the whale book too daunting, Israel Potter would be a more accessible introduction to the writing of Melville.

I read a Penguin classics edition that has an introduction by Robert S. Levine that is very good. It puts the novel into the historical context of a nation headed towards civil war, and shows subtle ways in which Melville may have been using the Revolutionary War to comment on his own times. I would, however, read the novel first and then go back and read the introduction afterward, as there is a lot of re-hashing of the plot.

As a matter of personal taste, I found the text to have been too heavily footnoted. Footnotes interrupt the flow of the reading, and should, I think, only be used when absolutely necessary to clarify an important point that a modern reader is likely to miss. Anyone who is likely to be reading this book does not need a footnote to tell them who Machiavelli was, or that Bon jour means good day in French. Perhaps this is nit-picky of me, but it only takes one mouse turd to ruin a great meal.