PERHAPS IT'S NOT AS MEMORABLE AS "CALL ME ISHMAEL," but it's an intriguing beginning all the same:

"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last."

So opens Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife, or, The Star-Gazer, in which the author undertakes a task as fraught with peril and pride as the mad captain's pursuit of the white whale: writing a companion piece to Moby-Dick, one of the two seminal novels in American literature (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn being the other).

Naslund, a professor at the University of Louisville and Vermont College, comes to the task as a scholar of Melville and of nineteenth-century literature in general, but this is no dry tome. Much of the tale of Una Spenser is, its relationship to Moby-Dick aside, a ripping yarn, though it goes a bit adrift toward the end.

Born in the Kentucky wilderness and raised in a lighthouse on an idyllic island off Massachusetts, Una runs away to sea disguised as a cabin boy at 16, barely survives a harrowing shipwreck, marries two madmen and one sane one, rescues a runaway slave and loses her firstborn child all in one night, pals around with such luminaries as Margaret Fuller and Frederick Douglass, and tells the whole story in rich and lovely language.

In fact, you don't have to have read Moby-Dick to enjoy Ahab's Wife. But this book is very much based upon Melville's, and not only in its borrowing of characters -- Una is the "young girl-wife I wedded past fifty" Ahab refers to in "The Symphony" chapter, the mother of his only child. And Naslund's version of Ahab at home is a logical extension of Melville's courageous, eccentric, fiercely intelligent captain of the Pequod.

Like Moby-Dick, this book consists of many, mostly short chapters, some plot-driven and some almost self-contained essays on nature, philosophy or history, some prose poems by Una or monologues by various other characters. Naslund's language, like Melville's, reverberates with echoes of Shakespeare and the Bible; she creates a credible facsimile of 19th-century style but streamlines it for the modern ear.

Ahab's Wife borrows many of its themes from Moby-Dick as well -- humankind's relation to nature, the conflict between love and freedom. But Naslund comes at those themes from a very different direction; Una's strong sense of family and her mystical sense of union with the natural world are counterpoint to Ahab's lonely compulsions.

And Naslund's focus on such social issues as women's rights and slavery would have flummoxed old cannibal Ahab, no doubt. Yet they do not jar in this story; the century Una lives in was, after all, the century of the abolitionists, the dawning of the women's movement and myriad Utopian experiments.

Naslund incorporates them into the flow of Una's life convincingly, and that life carries us along like the seas she sails. Una's mother is a gentle woman cultivated enough to name her daughter after the heroine of Edmund Spenser's epic poem "The Faerie Queene." But her father is a harsh man and a fanatical Christian who cannot fathom his daughter's independent nature and lack of faith: "Perhaps there was some imbalance in my brain -- I don't know. But the belief that was imbibed by everyone I knew, with scarcely a moment of skepticism, seemed to me most unlikely," Una says.

In the close quarters of their cabin on a remote farm, he grows less tolerant of her and less stable. After he shoots the family dog in a moment of pique and quotes the Bible to his stunned 12-year-old daughter to justify it, Una's mother fears so much for the child's safety she sends her off to live with her aunt, the mother's sister.

This chapter of Una's life is as bright as her childhood was dark. Aunt Agatha and Uncle Torchy are Unitarians, as far from fundamentalism as they can get, and their loving home at the lighthouse's foot -- a cottage wearing a sweet blanket of climbing roses, edged all around by the sea -- is an Eden for Una and her younger cousin Frannie.

Una reads voraciously, fishes and herds goats, falls in love for life with the sea and sky. She nurses Frannie through a terrible bout of smallpox, and then one day her life changes course again when two young men arrive to install a new light in the tower.

Giles Bonebright is tall and fair and intellectual, Kit Sparrow short and dark and charmingly wild. Una isn't sure which one she is more in love with, but after word comes from Kentucky of her father's death, she feels an urge for change.

On an impulse, she disguises herself as a boy and gets a job on a whaler that Giles and Kit are sailing on. It is at first a marvelous adventure, but in mid-Pacific the boat is stove by a whale. The 12 survivors -- Una, Kit and Giles among them -- in one lifeboat vote to head for faraway Chile rather than the much nearer Tahiti because they fear the cannibals in the latter. It proves to be a chillingly ironic decision.

The few final survivors are rescued by a merchant ship; fewer still -- Una and Kit -- are turned over to the Pequod, bound for New Bedford. When Una marries Kit, Ahab performs the ceremony. But Kit is already slipping into insanity; despite Una's care, he soon must be confined. As she tries to imagine how she will cope with Kit back in Massachusetts, she also has a vision of Ahab's future one day while she is on lookout duty atop the mast:

"And to the north again. A vast, what is that form? It slides under the water all square in front and tapering. How came that iceberg so rapidly, so close? Not ice. Living flesh. A sperm whale the color of ice!

"He turns and swims parallel to us. He is like a ghostly shimmer under the blue-white water. He could be a mass of bubbles, a cloud. ... Ah, Ahab, you assigned me to sing out for icebergs only. I will bless you, this voyage, with silence on the subject of a white whale and all his massive innocence."

But she is linked inextricably to Ahab, more so than to her first husband, and it is not long before Kit deserts her and she marries the captain on the deck of the Pequod, in a spur-of-the-moment ceremony performed once again by Ahab that suggests both the romantic side of his soul and his future monomania: "'Here,' Ahab said, 'what I did join together, I now put asunder.'"

Una and Ahab's love story is vivid and touching, though they spend almost all their time apart. Naslund captures the loneliness of the lives of sailors' wives in a time when such men might be gone for years at a time, with no reliable way of communicating with home -- a separation few of us can imagine. But it also teaches Una self-reliance, which she will need most terribly when the story takes the turn we know it must.

Una's life goes on after Ahab goes down with the whale, but once he is gone this book is strangely becalmed. She makes a home on Nantucket, raises Ahab's son, befriends the mate's widow Mary Starbuck, meets a range of 19th-century celebrities (including Nathaniel Hawthorne, with whom she has a surreal encounter in the woods near Ralph Waldo Emerson's house). She even gets married again, to a surprising suitor.

But the book's last chapters seem sketchy and thin compared to its first three-quarters. Una's first two children, one of whom dies hours after birth, are essential elements in her story, but her third child, by her third husband, is mentioned once in a subordinate clause. Other previously vivid characters are disposed of almost as summarily, and the adventure of Una's early years gives way to a surrender to domesticity that seems not quite in character.

Of course, the story from Ahab's point of view has a dramatic advantage -- it's hard to top going out on the back of a white whale as your ship spirals into perdition. Poor Una just has to fade away, living happily ever after.

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Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund

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Colette's List 7: A Monstrous Regiment of Women

Colette's List 8: The Inferno: James Ellroy's L.A.

Colette's List 9: Spenser Is Parker, Only Taller

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Colette's List 15: Kingsolver: Power & Its Price

Colette's List 16: Macdonald: Secret Lusts & Terrible Revenge

Colette's List 17: Creating Colette: A Scandal In Paris

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Colette's List 19: Betrayal & Madness, Loss & Redemption

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Colette's List 22: Broken Language, Busted Bench

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Colette Bancroft, a writer known at various times in her career to date as The Goddess of the Classroom, The Empress of Haute Cuisine and The Spitball Queen, is at work on a mystery novel of her own. She is an editor on the Metro Desk at the St. Petersburg Times.

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