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When I finished reading Peter Matthiessen's last novel, "Far Tortuga," 15 years ago, I felt the need to re-read "Moby Dick." This was not because "Far Tortuga," like "Moby Dick," is a seafaring moral-and-philosophical epic about survival and the myth of heroism, confined, as such tales have to be, to an all-male cast of seafaring characters; but because, like "Moby Dick," "Far Tortuga" was a novel so singular, so riffy in its many strains of individual human blues, so beautiful and original that it stood alone as something unlike anything I'd ever read.
What it had in common with Melville's classic was its incomparability to other works of fiction. What it had in common with the other novels of its decade-"Executioner's Song," "Rabbit Redux," "Good as Gold," "The Ghost Writer," "Gravity's Rainbow"-was, to borrow a minimalist's phrase, less than zero.
"Far Tortuga's" gifts were lasting. On the surface, it's the tale of the doomed schooner Eden casting for sea turtles in the Cayman Islands and manned by nine doomed men, only one of whom survives the expedition. At Eden's helm is one Capt. Raib Avers, an anti-Ahab figure in his decrepitude and dereliction, but a leader whose visionary mission takes them, nevertheless, to their destruction.
That is, more or less, the plot. But what took one's breath away was Matthiessen's command of rhythm and of language. "I wish I could speak good," he had one of his sailors say: "De things I feelin . . . ."
It is that particular evocation, what Matthew Arnold called "the amount of felt life," that is the hallmark and the genius of all of Matthiessen's books. Whether he is writing fiction or nonfiction, what is at the center of his prose is a richness of experience, a kinesthetic sensitivity to how the world is lived in by all living things, not merely men and women. He evokes The World, its mysteries and histories, and makes it felt.
In the decade-and-a-half since "Far Tortuga," he has written (to name a few) "The Snow Leopard," "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse," "Indian Country" and, most recently, "Men's Lives"-all of them nonfiction and each one of them contributing to his reputation as a world-class man of conscience, adventurer,...