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Rating: 
Summary: story about story-telling
Review: His contemporaries just did not get it, but then Melville's great works were all written on the eve of the Civil War. Race, region and property were tearing the country apart, and this coming storm is the setting for this April Fool's Day ride on the Mississippi.
The works of Mark Twain are dogged with controversy. In Innocents Abroad, for example, a simple discussion of Lake Como leads to a discussion of Lake Tahoe, leading to a racist tirade against the Washoe tribe of Nevada. (This would be a tame example.) Perhaps we cannot understand the times apart from Twain's Indian-hating.
In The Confidence Man, Melville gives us a whole chapter on Indian-hating. It is a story about story-telling above all else; yet, it also takes us into the minds of Melville's contemporaries.
Samuel Clemens was a great comic writer, and his greatest works remain important historical documents as well as entertaining fictions. Race dogs them, but Melville transcended this problem. In Black Guinea we sense the rich language of American blacks, and we are given a glance at the many levels on which it operates.
When Black Guinea tries to defend himself, he says "dis poor ole darkie is werry well wordy of all you kind ge'mmen's kind confidence." Worthy or wordy, or maybe both? Herman Melville is in control of just about every word in this book.
Moby Dick is adventure; The Confidence Man is entertainment. It puts you into a place that only story-telling knows. Liking puns helps.
Rating:
Summary: Never more true than in 2002
Review: No other Melville novel reminds me more of William Gaddis than The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. In other words, Melville's corrosive yet understated, quintessentially American apocalypse is not an easy read but it rewards the attentive reader. Since I first read it I've never heard the word "confidence" spoken without re-experiencing something of Melville's irony. (And I've been reminded of that irony more frequently recently because the word has seems to have become a great favorite of our own president!) Melville's ironic sense, sharper here than in any of his other novels, shines in wonderfully wrought sentences. Such as:"[H]e seemed to have courted oblivion, a boon not often withheld from so humble an applicant as he." (Chapter 2) And, "Gradually overtaken by slumber, his flaxen head drooped, his whole lamb-like figure relaxed, and half reclining against the ladder's foot, lay motionless, as some sugar-snow in March, which, softly stealing down over night, with its white placidity startles the brown farmer peering out from his threshold at daybreak." (Chapter 1) And, "[O]ne of those who, at three-score-and-ten, are fresh-hearted as at fifteen; to whom seclusion gives a boon more blessed than knowledge, and at last sends them to heaven untainted by the world, because ignorant of it; just as a countryman putting up at a London inn, and never stirring out of it as a sight-seer, will leave London at last without once being lost in its fog or soiled by its mud." (Chapter 45)
Rating:
Summary: Never more true than in 2002
Review: No other Melville novel reminds me more of William Gaddis than The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. In other words, Melville's corrosive yet understated, quintessentially American apocalypse is not an easy read but it rewards the attentive reader. Since I first read it I've never heard the word "confidence" spoken without re-experiencing something of Melville's irony. (And I've been reminded of that irony more frequently recently because the word has seems to have become a great favorite of our own president!) Melville's ironic sense, sharper here than in any of his other novels, shines in wonderfully wrought sentences. Such as: "[H]e seemed to have courted oblivion, a boon not often withheld from so humble an applicant as he." (Chapter 2) And, "Gradually overtaken by slumber, his flaxen head drooped, his whole lamb-like figure relaxed, and half reclining against the ladder's foot, lay motionless, as some sugar-snow in March, which, softly stealing down over night, with its white placidity startles the brown farmer peering out from his threshold at daybreak." (Chapter 1) And, "[O]ne of those who, at three-score-and-ten, are fresh-hearted as at fifteen; to whom seclusion gives a boon more blessed than knowledge, and at last sends them to heaven untainted by the world, because ignorant of it; just as a countryman putting up at a London inn, and never stirring out of it as a sight-seer, will leave London at last without once being lost in its fog or soiled by its mud." (Chapter 45)
Rating:
Summary: What is he really saying?
Review: The book was fascinating, but not nearly so much as the different opinions about the book and its meaning. And so here is my theory: The Confidence Man is not a shape-shifter. In fact, there is no character in the book we could call the Confidence Man. The con is within ourselves, an intrinsic part of our natures. We are not conned we con ourselves. Perhaps best illustrated in the part where Melville talks about writing. In the end, how do you choose the outcome? You will take a walk in the dark, whether it be with faith or fear.
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