Geoffrey Sanborn's slim volume is an explication of his title concept – The Value of Herman Melville – and an exploration of the types of reading that are possible when we do not take Melville's value for granted. Sanborn invites readers to approach “Herman Melville” not as a signifier of cultural value, but as a writer whose texts reward their intense and immediate engagement. Rather than arguing for the importance of certain themes across Melville's works, Sanborn presents an intricate examination of Melville's processes, both literary and intellectual. He does so through extended close readings that analyze patterns in language, tone, and form at the micro level. Such sustained attention to the formal qualities of literary writing is unusual in contemporary criticism, but Sanborn's approach illuminates how Melville's writing is characterized by creativity in progress, producing texts that are best encountered “in a free, moment-to-moment, forward-moving way” (57), and in which ideas are always emerging but never fixed.

Sanborn's movement away from what Melville's writing means to what Melville's writing does is an engaging corrective to portraits of Melville as a teller of pessimistic truths, or, as Sanborn himself puts it, a “Man Who Has Counsel for His Readers” (28). Sanborn paints a writer who “dwells in possibility,” in the words of Melville's contemporary Emily Dickinson, and has not yet come to conclusions about the topics that he takes up. The overarching quality of Melville's writing, Sanborn argues, is not bitter irony but earnest inquiry, in which the reader is invited to participate. Arguing that Melville's writing nourishes readers while surviving their creative destruction of the text, Sanborn uses psychoanalytic theory to position Melville's writing as a maternal environment, rebutting commonplaces about Melville as an essentially masculine writer. An impressive close reader of Melville, Sanborn captures the energized and energizing qualities of his writing that are often lost in more traditional critical treatments of his work. Indeed, this book would be particularly useful for undergraduates as a model for how to move through the twisting extravagance of Melville's prose; they will also appreciate Sanborn's clear and engaging prose.

However, Sanborn's emphasis on readers’ intimate relation with Melville's texts means that his book does not consider how other values for Melville emerge from contextually driven readings that explore how Melville's work interacts with his historical moment, and with our own. With the notable exception of reading Ishmael's encounter with Queequeg as a challenge to racism perpetuated through white people's lack of curiosity and openness towards nonwhite people, Sanborn neglects many of the ways Melville might be most valuable today. There is, for example, nothing about the ways in which Melville examines and provides ways of thinking about economic inequality, environmental catastrophe, and renewed political nationalism. While Sanborn admits that his study is “necessarily subjective,” the decision to stick exclusively to formalist explorations of Melville's writing leads to a narrower conception of its values than might otherwise have been possible.

Furthermore, Sanborn's approach to Melville relies upon and reinforces traditional practices and perspectives in Melville studies and literary studies more widely, even as he seeks new routes into Melville's work. Sanborn recites the narrative of Melville's life crafted in the Melville revival – family struggle, early success, Moby-Dick as artistic zenith, and then failure and obscurity – without exploring how this narrative is a product of the literary climate in which it emerged, and how it contributed to the emergence of Melville as author–genius that Sanborn elsewhere suggests prevents genuine engagement with his work. Sanborn also employs early and mid-twentieth-century writers, such as Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, to elucidate the qualities he finds in Melville's writing. Such connections implicitly echo traditional views of Melville as alienated from his own historical moment, and best understood as a proto-modernist. Sanborn's close-reading methodology is a child of the same modernist moment, and he does not address whether this traditional and formalistic method is uniquely suited to explicating Melville's value, or whether Melville's writing is uniquely valuable because it responds so well to this traditional mode of reading. As such, Sanborn echoes several of the intellectual currents and methodologies that transformed Herman Melville into the Great American Novelist, even as he resists this categorization. Nevertheless, the book celebrates the curiosity, surprise and experiment of Melville's writing, and is a lively and encouraging introduction to Melville that differs from other studies by emphasizing form over context.