Reimagining ‘Moby-Dick’

Mark Twain is credited with defining a literary classic as “something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” For many, if not most, readers Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” falls into that category. Claims to have read it even once are often met with a skeptically raised eyebrow or an astonished, “Why?”

Author Tara Karr Roberts has not only read Melville’s classic but used his novel as the impetus for her debut novel, “Wild and Distant Seas,” published this month by W. W. Norton & Co.

The book’s launch is scheduled for 7 p.m. Wednesday in the 1912 Center’s Great Room, 412 East Third St., Moscow.

First reviews of Roberts’ novel indicate no one will be asking why you'd read it. As Ruth Emmie Lang writes, “Wholly absorbing and beautifully written, ‘Wild and Distant Seas’ is sure to someday be a classic in its own right.”

In a recent interview, Roberts explained that reading “Moby-Dick” — a novel she found “weird and fascinating” — in her last class for her master’s degree in English at the University of Idaho triggered a desire to give one of the few female characters in the novel her own voice. Thus, the first of four first-person narrators, Mrs. Hosea Hussey, who has the largest female role in “Moby-Dick,” was granted the opportunity to tell her own story because Roberts “bet she had a story that Ishmael missed.”

That story subsequently became the first section of Roberts' novel, which parallels "Moby-Dick," she explained, but moves on from there.

Roberts assures her readers it is not necessary to have read Melville’s novel to be able to read and  enjoy hers, which she described as a book about desires and stories and how they change over the course of a person’s lifetime, something she learned as a journalist and from her own family’s stories.

Part of “Wild and Distant Seas” is set in Moscow, around 1900. Roberts had the opportunity to study hand-drawn maps of Moscow from that period and found them fascinating because of the history they revealed. In addition, an Idaho Arts Commission grant allowed her to travel to Nantucket in May 2021, where she was able to research maps, government documents, recipes and more from the 19th century. Most of her research, however, was conducted through digital archives and interlibrary loans.

The most difficult part of composing her novel, Roberts said, was creating the four narrators, one of whom is her favorite character, but the one many readers list as their least favorite. If she had realized the difficulty of creating that many narrators, she admits she might have written a different type of story.

“But I learned how to write a novel by writing a novel,” she said.

Roberts was born in Moscow, and raised in Laclede, a town of 300 people, on the Pend Oreille River. She returned to Moscow in 2003 to attend the University of Idaho and never left. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English in 2007, she worked for the Moscow-Pullman Daily News for two years. Following that, she worked for five years at UI as a science writer and another five years as the student media adviser, alongside completing her master’s and raising her two children.

More recently, she has worked as an adjunct faculty member, teaching English and journalism classes at UI. She currently is a freelance writer for universities across the U.S. She also has begun work on a second novel that will focus on northern Idaho.

BookPeople of Moscow will be selling copies of Roberts’ novel at the signing for $27.99.

Sullivan, a retired Lewis-Clark State College professor, can be reached at gesullivan@lcsc.edu.