Dayswork
Some real literary figures feature in Dayswork, a novel by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel (who are married to each other). Namely, Herman Melville, but also Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Lowell, literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick, and the still-living and Pulitzer-winning Melville biographer Hershel Parker (thinly veiled as “The Biographer”). They aren’t characters, exactly, as they play the historical figures that they actually are only through the lens of the protagonist’s internet deep dive as she becomes obsessed with Melville during the early days of the pandemic — that time when we were all sequestered inside with our computers as our only tethers to the outside world.
Like Small Ceremonies, Carol Shields’ first novel (and my favorite), Dayswork mines others’ lives as characters attempt to make sense of their own. In the case of Small Ceremonies, protagonist Judith Gill is a biographer going all-in on Canadian pioneer and poet Susanna Moodie, and in Dayswork, a wife draws her husband in to the aforementioned Melville quest. I suppose we could call these examples of meta bibliotherapy? Things get even more meta when one sees that, in real life, Parker has reviewed Dayswork on Amazon and takes issue with how he was portrayed in some parts. (!!)
Dayswork is what I’d call a “quiet” book, tracing the mundane nuances that make up a life. (The scenes where the husband and wife are texting while he’s isolating in the basement are A+.) However, technology has a starring role here. Just as it keeps a married couple connected even though they’re in the same house, technology is what connects the wife to her literary obsessions. So often novels about “technology” veer into sci-fi, dystopian, or “Big Tech is evil” territory. But Dayswork summons something else — something more akin to Marilynne Robinson or Wendell Berry — despite having the whole plot essentially hinge on one’s internet connection. That “something” is a lovely look at marriage, vocation, and how we create and make sense of art.
“Even a quiet person says a lot in a day, almost all of which is forgotten. Not forgotten, I suppose, but unremembered.”
Sometimes, the internet helps us remember.
originally published on instagram