Just Following Up will focus on the books that come immediately after lauded debuts, breakthrough successes, career pinnacles, and era-defining works. These follow-up books are often doomed under the weight of expectation, and while they’re also often not as good as their predecessors, they do offer a fascinating insight into an author’s career. Today’s follow-up: Herman Melville’s Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities.
Imagine this: you’ve just finished Moby-Dick.1 That’s right – after 135 chapters and an epilogue, you’ve put the final period on a masterpiece that won’t be matched in ambition or accomplishment by any of your fellow Americans for about 100 to 120 years.2 If you’re not the literary type, imagine you’ve just put in the best TPS report of all time – are TPS reports still a thing? Have people ever done TPS reports? – or logged the best Excel spreadsheet of your life, or completed a piece of business that will immiserate generations to come under the yoke of capitalism, or, for a nice example, you’ve fostered the growth of a majestic oak tree that will delight generations to come despite their immiseration, or you’re Josh Allen and you’ve just won the 2023 Super Bowl for the Buffalo Bills. You have done it – successfully reached the furthest edges of your dreams and ambitions. The question now is – what are you going to do next?
We can’t all be Josh Allen and just say we’re “going to Disney World, Jim!” and then party for six months, though. The actual author of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville, probably would’ve been better served by going to Disney World, or whatever the 1850s version of it was – probably the Oneida Company – than what he ended up doing. Melville would’ve been better off just taking a break and not writing for a little bit after inking that last period on “only found another orphan.” And yet you can kind of see the allure of what Melville actually did – he just kept going, immediately. The last book was so good, so why stop now? Why not pull up for a heat check? Melville had walked the tight-rope, mentally speaking, to produce Moby-Dick, and if you read that book you can tell – it is an urgently and literally exhaustive book, the portrait of a mind’s consumption by a grand vision. Most anyone else would sit back for a while; Melville chose to throw the dice one more time, and it came up snake eyes.3 And thus we have Pierre.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Evan Reads to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.