Pierre, or, The Ambiguities Book

Rating this book was frustrating. It's one of those works which, when you try to view it coherently in your mind, assault you equally with its ridiculous shortcomings and its magnificent strengths until you're robbed of your ability to appraise its value in a straightforward way.

Pierre is a romance set in the pastoral country'a marked departure from his previous novels, such as Typee and Omoo, which were all set at sea. Indeed, when he wrote Sophie Hawthorne in the midst of the project, he promised that his next work would be a "rural bowl of milk" far more appealing to feminine sensibility than the "bowl[s] of salt water" he'd sent her before. The recent commercial and critical failure of his last book, Moby Dick, no doubt played a hand in his intentions for Pierre. He informed his publishers that the next book would be "calculated for popularity... being a regular romance, with a mysterious plot to it, and stirring passions." That this pragmatic plan failed spectacularly doesn't necessarily tell on the quality of the novel, but it certainly left a lasting mark: the book shows signs of a wild struggle between the author's desire for artistic integrity on one hand, and popular acclaim on the other.

The book begins as a Gothic parody, following the troubles of Pierre Glendinning, the 19-year-old heir of Saddle Meadows. Chapter after chapter, Melville unrolls countless shopworn tropes for the delectation of his imaginary female readership'the Hidden Stain Upon the Family Honor! The Secret Family Member! The Heir's Disownment! But all this is told in florid, overwrought language so rococo and bizarre that it elevates the story to some literary purgatory beyond mere cliché. The writing is too strange to take itself seriously and too choked with clashing metaphors to rise above the level of parody'it occupies a self-mocking, self-loathing space that refuses to fully commit to one or the other. Yet at its best, the book occasionally gives us passages that resound with strange beauty:
Love sees ten million fathoms down, till dazzled by the floor of pearls. The eye is Love's own magic glass, where all things that are not of earth, glide in supernatural light. There are not so many fishes in the sea, as there are sweet images in lovers' eyes. In those miraculous translucencies swim the strange eye-fish with wings, that sometimes leap out, instinct with joy; moist fish-wings wet the lover's cheek.
Melville also subverts another popular trope'the inviolable sacredness of family'with an incest theme that infiltrates all the plot threads. At various points, Pierre engages in flirtations with three family members, including a male one. At one point he tries to make his real love interest into a cousin. Love in Pierre is not soft or quiet'it's a virulent contagion, the sheer power of which explodes boundaries painfully and ecstatically. Melville's literary excesses reverse the ordinary, build it over new: he makes our eyes swim with strange fish, fills the sea with swimming eyes.

Then, around the half-way point of the book, something stranger happens: Melville decides that he wanted to write a different kind of book. The novel belatedly informs us that Pierre is a well-known literary celebrity, and we're treated to a fascinating, acerbic disquisition on the pitfalls and caprices of literary authorship and celebrity. Particularly heartrending is the following passage, purportedly written about Pierre and his book, but which we can't help but see as a self-reflexive musing on the book itself:
Two books are being writ; of which the world shall only see one, and that the bungled one. The larger book, and the infinitely better, is for Pierre's own private shelf. That it is, whose unfathomable cravings drink his blood; the other only demands his ink. But circumstances have so decreed, that the one can not be composed on the paper, but only as the other is writ down in his soul.
It's all too readily apparent that though he may have started Pierre with the half-hearted intention of turning it into a cash cow, the book written in his soul eventually won out and attempted to wrestle control over the latter half of the book. His lamentations about how the pursuit of truth leads our hero to be regarded with "distrust, dislike, and…fear and hate" might equally apply to him and his repeatedly unsuccessful efforts to win the plaudits of an indifferent and scornful public. Yet even that didn't stop him from attempting the grand swing at literary greatness that this book ultimately does not achieve.

Upon finding out a family secret that puts him in a moral quandary, Pierre wedges himself under a precariously balanced boulder called the Memnon Stone and essentially dares heaven to crush him if his decision to live in truth put him in the wrong. Although Pierre was something of a hybrid mess that never reaches the heights of Moby Dick, it's in some ways more absorbing and moving. Though he doesn't always succeed in his vision, in the imperfect throes of this book'and in the occasional flashes of greatness in the individual passages, which were among the best I've ever read in any book'I can see Melville wedging his body under the massive Memnon Stone each time he writes, daring the boulder to smash him (and half-expecting it to), with all the melancholy humor, existential despair, and reckless courage of a man who writes ultimately for his soul, only for his soul.