Lucchesi and The Whale

"Lucchesi and The Whale" is an unusual work of fiction by controversial critic and novelist 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".

A writer himself, Lucchesi tells his students that he teaches "only because [his] fiction is commercially untouchable" and to "never forget that." Isolated, anxiety-ridden, and relentlessly self-involved, he does achieve a precarious triumph, finding "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".

Frank Lentricchia is Katherine Everett Gilbert Professor of Literature and Theater Studies at Duke University.He is the author of numerous critical books including "After the New Criticism", "Ariel and the Police", and "Modernist Quartet" and several novels including "Johnny Critelli" and "The Music of the Inferno".

He is coeditor of "Close Reading: The Reader" and "Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11", both also published by Duke University Press.