Rating: 
Summary: .
Review: As I read this book, I didn't catch all the subtleties of it, and could never be precisely sure whether each confidence man was evil or not- it seemed ambiguous, or at least, the author never once allows the reader to find out definitively that the 'vicitms' are being gulled. However, by the end of the book, this becomes more clear as the second half settles into sxome extremely thought-provoking conversations and exchanges. After reading literary reviews online, the book in its totality makes even more sense as in retrospect its sublte points become clearer.
That being said, the writing is absolutely superb. Although far more wordy than Hemingway, one cannot avoid comparing to Hemingway's writing, which, like this, is extremely controlled, restrained and pointed. As you read this, you cannot avoid the feeling that the author spent hours on each sentence.
It is therefore very much so worth reading, but don't expect it to be easy. It's certainly not your verbose, nineteenth century romanctic glop, but it can be difficult, as some readers appear to have found it. But try it.
Rating: 
Summary: Not completely worthless.
Review: I consider Melville's more famous work, "Moby Dick", to be perhaps the most overrated book in the English language; in spite of that, I decided to try this one on the grounds that perhaps my dislike of that one was a fluke (no pun intended) and that perhaps some other of Melville's works might be more congenial.This book definitely has some advantages over "Moby Dick". It's shorter, for one thing, and the digressions are both shorter themselves, and less frequent. But they are, if anything, even more annoying; if there's anything I LESS need to read than dissertations on the nuts and bolts of 19th century whaling, it's chapters in which an author steps outside of his story to defend details of his writing. What's more, while "Moby Dick" is 400+ pages of story with about 50 pages of plot, this book is 250+ pages with absolutely NO plot; all it is is episodic recitations of one character (a man of 1000 faces) swindling numerous other characters, some more well-developed than others. And if the writing style isn't QUITE as pretentious as in "Moby Dick", it's still too pretentious for my taste. Still, the book is not completely worthless. It brings to mind some interesting points for debate; which is worse, the con man himself, or the people who he CAN'T swindle because they're so cynical and untrusting? Is it worth becoming that cynical to avoid being gulled by such a con man? Is it possible to retain a reasonable amount of faith in people, and still avoid being swindled? What would have been the appropriate response in (pick a scene)? I would recommend that if you are going to read it, do so as a part of a literary discussion group, or something similar, so that you will have someone to discuss it with. That's where its value lies, certainly not as an entertaining read.
Rating:
Summary: No Confidence?
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: An above average work by a great author
Review: If you love Melville, then I suggest this book with little reservation. It is not an easy read, however, and is often bogged down by long discourses. I usually am a fan of heavy annotation, but I found that these notes were distracting at times.
Rating:
Summary: Skip Moby Dick and read this instead...
Review: OK, well maybe read "Moby Dick" too, but if you're going to read just one book by Melville, I suggest this one. Disregarded in Melville's lifetime, this book could have been written today...except that it exemplifies the cultural moment that produced it. Lyrical, magnificent, prescient, and wonderfully confusing, I'm on a personal mission to introduce this novel to as many people as possible.
Rating:
Summary: Skip Moby Dick and read this instead...
Review: OK, well maybe read "Moby Dick" too, but if you're going to read just one book by Melville, I suggest this one. Disregarded in Melville's lifetime, this book could have been written today...except that it exemplifies the cultural moment that produced it. Lyrical, magnificent, prescient, and wonderfully confusing, I'm on a personal mission to introduce this novel to as many people as possible.
Rating:
Summary: Quite an Original
Review: Quite an Original The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade
I am specifically reviewing the Northwestern University Press edition of Melville's "The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade." There is a Norton Critical Edition of this novel edited by Hershel Parker, but it doesn't seem to be offered by Amazon.com. It is offered at at W.W. Norton's website... The Hendricks House edition edited by Elizabeth Foster is another good edition, but it seems to be out of print at the moment. On November 12, 1856 Herman Melville and Nathanial Hawthorne took a walk among the sandhills near Liverpool, England. They smoked cigars, and Hawthorne wrote about a week later that Melville spoke of Providence and futurity, and he, Melville, had pretty much made up his mind to be annilated. "The Confidence-Man" is the last novel that Melville published during his lifetime. I agree with Newton Arvin, who called "The Confidence-Man" "one of the most infidel books ever written by an American; one of the most completely nihilistic, morally and metaphysically." About 150 years after the book was first published, and about fifty since the book was first taken seriously by literary critics, The Confidence-Man is not a settled matter. In fact there remains excessive discord among readers and critics about the worth of this novel. Some compare it to Swift's "Tale of the Tub," others will tell you that this book is static and formless. The idea is simple enough. On April 1 a devil in the guise of a deaf mute goes aboard a Mississippi river steamboat, and begs for charity. In rapid succession he transforms himself into a crippled Black man, a man with the weed, the man in the grey coat , the gentleman with the big book, the man with the plate and finally the Cosmopolitan. In these different guises he gulls and diddles people. He asks for trust. He is not always successful, but he can take solace in his failures. The reason for the devil's failures is the cyniscim, mistrust and mysandry of his marks. It is their human failings that accounts for his failures. And that's not so bad for the devil. Melville's control of his material was never greater. I recommend the Northwestern Newberry edition because it contains draft fragments of chapter 14. You can see how carefullly Melville wrote this novel. The blandness of the prose is deliberate. If you read the surviving drafts you will see how Melville purposedly silenced and muted his message. Perhaps Melville was too successful for even close readers get lost sometimes. At the end there is an increase of seriousness. An old man closes his Bible and asks for a life preserver. The Cosmopolitan hands the old man a chamberpot which appears to be full, and calls it a life preserver. The Cosmopolitan then extinguishes the lamp, and then leads the other into the darkness.
Rating: 
Summary: Melville and his Masques
Review: Set aboard a Mississippi side-wheel steamer in the 1850s, Melville's novel charts the progress of the American character at a time when the old frontier was giving way, albeit slowly, to a new, urban frontier. "The Confidence-Man" works at so many different levels that it is no wonder Melville's readers weren't quite sure what to make of his ninth novel. It is a call-and-response of idealism suborned for the purposes of sheer humbuggery, material theft and moral sophistry. I think readers would do well to always keep the word "confidence" in mind as they read the novel; it recurs time and again in different contexts throughout the book. Melville's purpose is to highlight the rift between what things seem to be and what they truly are. It is eerily existential in tone and readers familiar with Kierkegaard and Camus will be delighted by Melville's keen appreciation for the absurdity of the human condition. The wretched reception of "The Confidence-Man" undermined what little was left of Melville's own self-confidence as a writer whose work could support his family. In one sense, this was a grievous shame, because Melville lived for nearly four more decades and, presumably, could have spent that time producing more great literature had his contemporaries simply recognized the intellectual genius of his work. In another sense, though, "The Confidence-Man" is a fitting send-off to a literary career hobbled by critical inattention and plain bad luck. Melville's America is not an America where dreams come true (note how China Aster is destroyed by his) and where confidence -- optimism -- is rewarded or even warranted. Yet, it is an America recognizably closer to the one we live in than those crafted by Melville's contemporaries -- Emerson, Thoreau, Irving. "The Confidence-Man" is a very complex novel of ideas. This particular edition is very useful because it provides fairly thorough annotation throughout the book. I would highly recommend it for use in a graduate course on American intellectual history, particularly juxtaposed against Emerson and Tocqueville's analyses of American society and culture.
Rating:
Summary: Melville's Least Understood Masterpiece
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Horrible and overrated
Review: This is like a precurser to the Beat movement of the 1950's. The sentences are overly long, it's written like a police report so you become overly aware that there is a narrator which takes much away from the telling of the story. The characters are not interesting and the story is boring.
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