WILD AND DISTANT SEAS

A Nantucket widow inherits an inn, and three generations of women succeed her.

Evangeline Hussey’s husband has been dead for a couple of years when two strangers show up at her Nantucket inn requesting a place to stay. One “wore the outfit of a sailor, yet when he clasped my hand in his, I felt the soft, unmarred skin of a boy from the city,” Evangeline says. “He said I should call him Ishmael.” This cringeworthy moment is not the first hint that Roberts has used the characters and plot of Moby-Dick to undergird her debut novel—but it is the clearest, made with all the subtlety of a piano played by a baseball bat. Hussey’s novel follows four generations of women who descend from Evangeline, but why she chose to root the tale in Melville’s work isn’t entirely clear. Without the references to Ishmael, Captain Ahab, et al., Roberts would have had a finely detailed piece of historical fiction on her hands, well researched and rich. She is a natural storyteller and her prose is engaging. But Melville is doing her no favors here. Nor are the magical threads woven through the story. Evangeline, it turns out, had a gift—she could see the recent memories of those around her—which her daughter, Rachel, inherits in her own way. Rachel has been given the power of suggestion and, simply by speaking, can convince those around her to bend to her will. All of this, taken together, feels rather like a smoke screen that hides the novel’s real action. What’s actually happening here? It doesn’t look like Roberts could decide, so she threw everything in.

Proceeding in fits and starts, this novel feels chaotic and poorly conceptualized.