"The lives of writers fascinate poet, biographer, and critic Parini, the author of novels about Tolstoy (The Last Station) and Walter Benjamin (Benjamin's Crossing). He now portrays the 'inscrutable' American original, Herman Melville, in a novel as mercurial as its subject. Parini has Melville's smart yet thwarted wife, Lizzie, narrate drolly in homebound chapters, while Melville tells epiphanic tales of his adventures at sea, the wellspring for his fiction. We also see him stoking a 'bonfire of language,' alarming his idol, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and experiencing a vision in the Holy Land. The daughter of a judge, Lizzie knew Melville was tempestuous, but she was unprepared for how demoralizing his drinking, depressions, and rage would become. Parini astutely contrasts the claustrophobia of the struggling Melville household with the boundless ocean and Melville's wild South Sea escapades, including his nearly mythic infatuations with alluring and unavailable young men.... Intermittently grim and witty, and catching fire the closer he comes to Melville's molten core, Parini's bold and mesmerizing novel ultimately deepens the mystery of Melville's incandescent genius."—Booklist