When readers think critically about Herman Melville, they seem to think about the writer as often as his works. That’s not necessarily to say we read him biographically—although biography certainly has its place—but instead transcendentally, as an author whose approach and concerns stretch across his entire oeuvre. My Melville, for example, has always been a comic Melville. I cannot approach Moby-Dick, much less Pierre, The Confidence-Man, or stories like “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” and “I and My Chimney” without being alert to his wit and joyous excess. Others read a metaphysical Melville, and yet others the homoerotic.

How do you find your Melville? I inherited mine from a professor who was taken with Melville’s overwhelming, breathless letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne, written during the composition of Moby-Dick, when the two were neighbors in the Berkshires. On Melville’s end, desperate pleas for a visit: “I keep the word ‘Welcome’ all the time in my mouth, so as to be ready on the instant when you cross the threshold.” On Hawthorne’s end, apparently, silence. Melville’s rawness and need for intimacy, I think, touched and amused this professor. But he also loved Melville’s language, chewed over and spat out Ahab’s cry of the white whale, “He tasks me! He heaps me!” And it seems to me that anyone who pays close attention to Melville’s words must see the intended humor in them. Could you really devote such care to language and not be sensitive to the hilarity of the phrase “I keep the word ‘Welcome’ all the time in my mouth”?

Approaching the text without someone to mediate, though, can (I suspect) be overwhelming. A first-time reader recently told me that he didn’t see the humor in the book at all—that the transitions between encyclopedic digression and metaphysical rumination (a formal juxtaposition that I find inherently, purposely funny, although richer than that too) struck him as utterly serious, completely earnest. He had an introduction to work with, but didn’t have a professor to pass down an approach, and didn’t have Melville’s other works as context. And so his Melville was, decidedly, a grave, philosophically engaged Melville—a Melville that, for him, emerged directly from the text of Moby-Dick.

All of these different Melvilles, of course, coexist perfectly well. None is truer than another; I surely wouldn’t pit my jokey Melville against anyone’s despairing author. But in the interest of helping readers form their own Melville, Nathaniel Philbrick, author of sea-oriented works including Away Off Shore, In the Heart of the Sea, and Sea of Glory, has written a delightful little book called Why Read Moby-Dick? (Viking, $25.00). At a slight 131 pages, it’s a quick read, a rapid baptism in the life of Herman Melville and the circumstances surrounding the writing and publication of Moby-Dick, and of the various arguments about and tensions within the book itself. And if the price at first seems high for such a brief reading experience, a glance at the material book itself should allay concerns. Why Read Moby-Dick? is one of the loveliest books I’ve ever seen, with an embossed, black, matte cover (which immediately recalls nineteenth-century covers); brilliant foil along the spine and in the title; and red, nautical-themed endpapers. I can’t do it justice here—this is a book not just to read but to own and to look at.

Who is Philbrick’s Melville? We might call him the sad Melville, a Melville who makes jokes and meditates deeply but is, under it all, kind of a broken man. He is the Melville who experienced the peak of his fame with the publication of his first book, Typee, a Polynesian adventure. He’s the Melville who saw his critics grow increasingly hostile. (An 1852 review in the Richmond Southern Literary Messenger notes that “Few books ever rose so rapidly and deservedly into popular favor as Typee . . . But from the time that Typee came from Mr. Melville’s portfolio, he seems to have been writing under an unlucky star. The meandering nonsense of Mardi was but ill atoned for even by the capital sea-pieces of Redburn and White Jacket; Moby-Dick proved a very tiresome yarn indeed, and as for [Pierre, or] the Ambiguities, we are compelled to say that it seems to us the most aptly titled volume we have met with for years.”) He’s the Melville with an unhappy marriage, the Melville rejected and dejected by Hawthorne, the Melville whose personal and business lives fizzled.

And yet he is not entirely beaten. What Philbrick finds in Moby-Dick is a knowledge of life’s darkness and a refusal to bend entirely to it. Here’s the importance of the humor bubbling past and through the philosophy—the buoying force that, like Queequeg’s coffin (the subject of some extended meditations  from Philbrick), keeps the book and Melville afloat. Philbrick—answering the question his title poses—writes, “This redemptive mixture of skepticism and hope, this genial stoicism in the face of a short, ridiculous, and irrational life, is why I read Moby-Dick.”

As he makes his way to this point, Philbrick hits on a lot of the most delightful moments of the book, including Ishmael’s thoughts on how to sleep comfortably (always expose one small part of your body to the cold of the room to heighten contrast) in the chapter “Nightgown.” Philbrick notes that he “cannot go to bed on a cold winter night without thinking of Ishmael’s lyrical aside”—and frankly, neither can I. “For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.” Do a cozier two sentences exist in the English language than these? Philbrick spends some time with Melville’s chowder recipe, the whiteness of the whale, and the doubloon—well-tread territory to be sure, but essential. These are the moments that convince you to read Moby-Dick.

And even if much of what Philbrick does here is synthesis, his sentences are so well-turned that they often illuminate anyway. “Instead of a man,” he writes, “Ahab is a piece of topography, a fractured continent echoing hurt and pain.” Or: “There it is, Ishmael’s vision of the future: a drowned world devoid of land dwellers, a paradise for whales.” Also: “Anyone who has swum out from a boat floating on the ocean or even on a large lake has felt the panic of realizing that below you is an emptiness so vast that you in your pitiful churnings are nothing.” And, finally, my favorite: “You’ve got to hand it to this castrated, one-legged, fifty-eight-year-old lapsed Quaker; he doesn’t mess around.”

If you’ve read and loved Melville in the past, Why Read Moby-Dick? won’t change your world, although you’ll probably find it a pleasant and occasionally surprising read. But if you’re coming to Melville for the first time, Philbrick’s book is worth dwelling on. Who will your Melville be?

Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Indiebound • Viking