Ernest Hemingway famously declared Huckleberry Finn to be the true font of American prose--and in the case of his own stripped-down stories, he was right. But there"s another, more rococo strain in our literature, of which fish fancier Herman Melville would be the undisputed king. So who better to chronicle his life in brief than Elizabeth Hardwick? This deliciously acerbic critic and novelist hasn"t, of course, attempted to mimic Melville"s language, which often sounds like the sort of thing Shakespeare would have written if he"d been an ichthyologist. But she, too, is the possessor of an eccentric, sometimes shaggy style, and has already written about Melville with rare penetration. Even her opening salvo has an appropriately over-the-top ring to it: Herman Melville: sound the name and it"s to be the romance of the sea, the vast, mysterious waters for which a thousand adjectives cannot suffice. Its mystical vibrations, the great oceans "holy" for the Persians, a deity for the Greeks; forbidden seas, passage to barbarous coasts--a scattering of Melville"s words for the urge to know the sparkling waters and their roll-on beauty and, when angry, their powerful, treacherous indifference to the floundering boat and the hapless mariners. In a study of this length (160 pages), Hardwick doesn"t even pretend to compete with such broad-canvas predecessors as Hershel Parker or Laurie Robertson-Lorant. But she hits all the high points (and the numerous low ones) in this all-American life, from Melville"s earliest seagoing expeditions to his running aground in middle age. "The cabin boy became a family man," she notes, "or at least a man with a family, one always at home, but hardly the man of the house, with his scullery routine of writing at frightening speed, as if driven by a tyrannical overseer." There was, alas, worse to come: trapped in a dead-end job as a New York customs inspector, Melville retreated into desperate silence. But Hardwick burrows in to disclose new singularities, new complications, and to acknowledge that her subject"s life is hardly less ambiguous than his art. "So much about Melville," we are told, "is seems to be, may have been and perhaps." What"s certain, however, is that we could hardly find a better narrator than Hardwick herself. --Bob Brandeis