Dayswork, by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel

I heard about this book from one of my favorite Substacks, The Biblioracle Recommends, by John Warner. It was in a post of Pulitzer Prize predictions (sidenote: these turn out to be very fun to read, because the awards are often curveballs, and totally shrouded in secrecy, so the guesses have to be broad), and his brief description — “A pandemic novel written in an aphoristic style mostly about Herman Melville, but also about marriage and domestic life.” — intrigued me, so I got a copy from the library, and gifted myself the time to tear through it in three long sessions.

I loved it. It’s a pandemic novel, and a work of literary scholarship, and a story of marriage — or rather, of marriages. Amusingly, it’s a novel written in the form of autotheory (I didn’t realize it was fiction until after I’d finished it and started poking around online trying to find out more about how it was co-authored). The narrative is composed in epigrams, and I know, you’re thinking it’s been done, it’s done to death, but it turns out that no, this novel makes this mode feel fresh and new and called into being by the experience it seeks to represent — pandemic lockdown.

The narrator and her husband are writers, and their daughters are in Zoom school. The narrator is researching Melville, and much of the book is a recounting of various pieces of information about his life and career. But it is also the story of scholarship about him, its production and reception, quarrels among biographers, the ripples in the field as researchers consider (or refuse to) the likelihood that he was an abusive husband, etc. The poor treatment his wife suffers at Melville’s hands shades into disregard from his biographers, which finds parallels in the contempt some of his male biographers have for studies of him written by women. A recurring theme is the invisible labor of women and their place in the historical record — a thread that is traced into the present, in the narrator’s meditations on her own life trajectory and marriage. Not that the representation of marriage is grim, far from it — the little punctuations of day-to-day life, brief exchanges between husband and wife, and wonderful in the way the light up so many layers of a relationship. Familiarity, fondness, irritation, desire — the big picture of a life built together.

There is no plot, but the book nonetheless feels quite structured and intentional, and is genuinely absorbing to read. It’s fascinating and rueful and funny, and also a really well-captured time capsule of one version of pandemic experience. I’m so glad to have read it!