Lucchesi and The Whale

by Frank Lentricchia

Lucchesi and The Whale is an unusual work of fiction by noted author and critic Frank Lentricchia. Its central character, Thomas Lucchesi Jr., is a college professor in the American heartland whose obsessions and compulsions include traveling to visit friends in their last moments of life—because grief alone inspires him to write—and searching for secret meaning in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Himself a writer of “stories full of violence in a poetic style,” Lucchesi tells his students that he teaches “only because [his] fiction is commercially untouchable” and to “never forget that.” Austerely isolated, anxiety-ridden, and relentlessly self-involved, Lucchesi nonetheless cannot completely squelch his eagerness for love.
Having become “a mad Ahab of reading,” who is driven to dissect the “artificial body of Melville’s behemothian book” to grasp its truth, Lucchesi allows his thoughts to wander and loop from theory to dream to reality to questionable memory. But his black humor-tinged musings are often as profoundly moving as they are intellectual, such as the section in which he ponders the life and philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein in relation to the significance of a name—and then attempts to share these thoughts with a sexy, middle-aged flight attendant—or another in which he describes a chance meeting with a similarly-named mafia don.
Despite apparent spiritual emptiness, Lucchesi in the end does find “a secret meaning” to Moby-Dick. And Lentricchia’s creations—both Lucchesi and The Whale and its main character—reveal this meaning through a series of ingeniously self-reflective metaphors, in much the way that Melville himself did in and through Moby-Dick. Vivid, humorous, and of unparalleled originality, this new work from Frank Lentricchia will inspire and console all who love and ponder both great literature and those who would write it.

128 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Antonio Iannarone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truly, I was out of sorts for three days and maybe I still am.

For the aspirant, it rings too loud to hear your idols despair of their position and cite the vacuums of their souls earned thereby.

There is, in one of the three sections, an inspired criticism of Moby-Dick where Ishmael-Ahab-Melville is characterized as the eternal orphan in the chasm of life.

Also Moby HYPHEN Dick (the title of a portly tome) is NOT THE SAME as Moby UNHYPHEN Dick (the name of the whale and of the faceless). Lucchesi will brook no confusion on this point.

And then a section of Wittgenstein and a horny ex-professor picking up Ailitalia flight attendants.

Lots of dick jokes, loneliness, writing-anxiety, philosophical assassinations.

Oh, its an 'experimental novel', if I hadn't made that clear.

[Ashley Speed · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe it has been too many years since I've been in an English class talking about real critisicm, but this book was over my head even though I think I understood the general gist of it. Luckily, it was short.