TMR Season 24: “The Confidence-Man” by Melville & “Mevill” by Rodrigo Fresán

First off, if you’re reading this post, I highly recommend you go sign up for the Three Percent Substack. In order to increase engagement and better share all the goings on here at Open Letter—podcasts, reviews, stats from the Translation Database, pieces on publishing, excerpts—in a fashion more in keeping with 2024 than 2010. Everything will still appear here, but will also be shared via the Substack, where you’ll also find bonus posts and other materials.

[This is not to be confused with the Mining the Dalkey Archive Substack, which was the first one I launched and, although it has some broad philosophical overlap with the Three Percent one, it exclusively focuses on Dalkey Archive titles, history, and stories. But please subscribe to that as well! There are some really interesting essays in the offing . . .]

As you may have noticed, last week Two Month Review dropped its first one-off episode on Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes & Frank Wynne. This is something we had been talking about for quite some while—a way to expand the number of books we’re covering (so as to include ones that aren’t 600 pages long) in a way that captures the spirit of TMR, but with a few wrinkles.

We’ll be experimenting with what works best over the coming months, and posting these as occasional bonus episodes along the way. We do have a few titles lined up, but the only one I want to announce now is that we’re doing Brian Wood’s Joytime Killbox next week, so expect that soon. (Should be interesting to hear Brian leading us through his own book, discussing what he thinks works, or would change now, who influenced him, etc.) After that . . . well, wait and see!

Our next full season of Two Month Review has also been decided, and it’s a twofer: First up will be The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville, followed by Melvill by Rodrigo Fresán & Will Vanderhyden. Full schedule detailed below.

It’s probably obvious why we decided to do these two books, but, for anyone who isn’t a long-time listener, we have dedicated almost three dozen episodes of TMR to Fresán, specifically his “Part Trilogy” (The Invented Part, The Dreamed Part, The Remembered Part). And we’re always going to feature his new titles as they’re released!

But in contrast to his other books, Melvill is “short,” clocking in at a tight 308 pages, so it makes sense to add on a related title. As much as I would love to reread Moby-Dick in this context, I think that The Confidence-Man is actually a better fit. A Melville title that some people might not be familiar with, but one that Fresán referred to as “Pynchon before Pynchon.”

Here’s the jacket copy from the Dalkey Archive edition (not currently available):

A scathing, razor-sharp satire set on a New Orleans-bound riverboat, The Confidence-Man exposes the fraudulent optimism of so many American idols and idealists—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and P. T. Barnum, in particular—and draws a dark vision of a country being swallowed by its illusions of progress.

It begins with a mute boarding a Mississippi boat and ends without a conclusion: “Something further may follow of this Masquerade.” In between, the confidence man, so well disguised as to avoid clear identification even by the reader, meets and tricks a boatful of unusual characters. The culmination of Herman Melville’s brilliant career as a novelist, and the introduction of a particularly American brand of satire that is as caustic as it is funny, The Confidence-Man creates an elaborate and beautiful masquerade that asks: who in this world is worth our confidence?

Why is Dalkey Archive doing yet another edition of The Confidence-Man? And why is it doing Melville at all? First, this edition, originally published by Bobbs-Merrill over forty years ago, contains remarkable annotations by H. Bruce Franklin, intended for both the general reader and the scholar. It’s an edition we have long admired. More importantly, we believe that The Confidence-Man is America’s first postmodern novel—game-like, darkly comic, and completely inventive.

I read this for the first time before we published it at Dalkey and remember being wonderfully surprised by how lively, how fun, how playful it was. Not that Melville’s other books aren’t those things, but this seemed like a swerve compared to say, Typee, or Billy Budd (but maybe not Bartleby the Scrivener).

As mentioned above, the Dalkey edition is between printings (using this podcast to prep the new files, actually), but there are many other editions out there. And the Dalkey one is easy to find used.

Teaser: Subscribe to the Mining the Dalkey archive for a special treat related to this book . . .

Rodrigo Fresán & Will Vanderhyden’s Melvill may well be their best collaboration to date. That’s saying a lot after the “Part Trilogy,” but this book is remarkable. It’s one of the few books I’ve published in which multiple people have emailed to tell me it’s one of the “best books they’ve ever read.” It is, to put this in crass, commercial (a.k.a., publisher) terms: This novel is the best chance to date for Fresán to breakout breakout among English readers. He’s had a lot of success, but given the subject matter (one of the Great American Novelists), its relatively short length, and the richness of the text itself (still replete with Fresán’s games), and the stunning cover (designed by Fresán’s son), this particular Fresán book is “approachable” (again, apologies for the gross publisher term) and thus could reach a very wide audience.

Instead of quoting the jacket copy, let’s just marvel at this STARRED Publishers Weekly review:

“Argentine writer Fresan (The Invented Part) focuses his visionary latest on the inner life of author Herman Melville and the exploits of his tormented father, Allan. In the first section, set in December 1831, 12-year-old Herman sits by Allan’s deathbed as the elder Melvill (the second “e” was added later) recounts his illustrious revolutionary roots in Boston, promising marriage to the fetching Maria Gansevoort, ruinous career as a merchant, and mystical final adventure, in which he walks across the frozen Hudson River and hears “messages seeming to come from the Beyond.” Herman faithfully records it all—but cannot resist scribbling copious footnotes that embellish, interrupt, and underscore Allan’s narrative. In the book’s second part, Allan speaks for himself, describing his time in Venice, where he encountered Nicolás Cueva, a “pale young man with white hair” who claims to be undead and imparts forbidden knowledge, prefiguring the subject matter of Herman’s novels. The magisterial final act returns to Herman, who narrates his adventures among sailors and cannibals, lambastes his critics, and reunites with his father’s ghost. The narrative gestures at the kind of ever-expanding realm of imagination that the great author himself incarnated, and the kind Fresan’s Herman prophesies: “A book (a pure style of book, a book of pure style) where many things would end so many others could begin.” This is a masterpiece.”

When I worked on Melvil, I saw it as a natural extension of the themes from the “Part Trilogy,” but also a sort of fresh start for anyone approaching Fresán’s works for the first time. There’s something for everyone . . .

So buy both—or download a public domain version of the Melville, but spend the money on Melvill—and join us for 10 weeks of hijinks and ideas about how narratives are constructed and stories inherited.

Here’s the official schedule (all dates are for the week of the YouTube recording and podcast release; stay tuned for specifics):

Nov 4: Chapters 1-9 of The Confidence-Man 

Nov 11: Chapters 10-19 of The Confidence-Man 

Nov 18: Chapters 20-26 of The Confidence-Man 

Nov 25: Chapters 27-38 of The Confidence-Man 

Dec 2: Chapters 39-End of The Confidence-Man 

Dec 9: Melvill (pgs 1-61)

Dec 16: Melvill (pgs 62-123)

Dec 23: NO EPISODE

Dec 30: Melvill (pgs 123-188)

Jan 6: Melvill (pgs 189-245)

Jan 13: Melvill (pgs 246-End)

See you on YouTube or in the podcast app (Apple, Spotify) of your choice!