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No Confidence?, Mar 6 2001
I take "The Confidence Man" to be a comedy of confused identities and good humor which together help us look at our notions of trust and kindness. A modern example of this level of the story can be found in the film "The Sting". There are other, more subtler things going on in Melville's book that merit more readings, of course, but much of the book can be enjoyed for its seemingly light-hearted look at our willingness to be duped by salesmen and hucksters. The particular edition that I read seemed to be a re-print of an earlier edition. There is a too-brief introduction to the author and the book. Likewise, there are no notes to help with some of the expressions common in the 19th century but since fallen into disuse in the 21st. For example, when one of the confidence men refers to his "father's friend, James Hall, the judge", I wondered if Melville was referring to his own father-in-law, who was a judge. Hall, it turns out, was a writer whose 1835 book "Sketches..." was one of Melville's sources. A good "companion" to The Confidence Man and other Melville works is The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, edited by R. S. Levine. And readers interested in pursuing the author in more depth will find fascinating reading in Leviathan, A Journal of Melville Studies.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Melville's Enigmatic American Testament., Jun 7 2000
With "The Confidence-Man," Melville offered a final novelistic expression of his hopes, doubts, and frustrations about the American nation on the verge of Civil War in the late 1850's. Many critics and reviewers take a negative point of view on this novel, saying that the narrative instability and episodic nature of the novel represents Melville's anger with the increasingly poor reception of his later novels, including the brilliant "Moby-Dick". Over the course of the novel's first half, we are presented with a string of characters who spout the virtues of charity and trust, all supposedly different manifestations of one Confidence-Man. The confidence-man engages passengers of the riverboat Fidele from St. Louis to New Orleans in philosophical, literary, personal, and business-related conversations. This is the heart of the novel, even in the second half, where only one confidence-man appears. As in Cervantes' "Don Quixote," you are able to tease out more about the ambiguous purposes of the novel through speeches rather than actions. At points amusing, horrifying, and sad, "The Confidence-Man" is difficult, if not impossible to categorize in any simple fashion. An extremely worthwhile read, especially if you read it as a prophetic work of the American Civil War and try to figure out for yourself if Melville thought things would turn out alright, or if the US was due for an apocalyptic judgment.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Melville's Least Understood Masterpiece, Feb 17 2000
The Confidence Man is without question the most revolutionary work of nineteenth century fiction--enormously experimental, provocative and simply bizarre. The experimentations with flatenned characterizations; the episodic, even repetitive plot structure; and the sheer power of its hallucinatory narration make this novel a post-modern work before there was even modernism. Greatly ignored in its own day, and for much of ours, the Confidence Man is central to an understanding of narrative history and the evolution of this tortured genius who, after his novel Pierre, seems to have transformed narrative conventions in a way that few readers have ever grasped. A brilliant, absolutely central work that makes the much-lauded experimentations of near-contemporary American writers seem puny by comparison.
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