Arvin Kraft loves his complicated family, but they talk about him: how
slow he is, how they need to share the burden of caring for him, how
tired they all are. He hides in the walls of the family's old house in
Boston and listens to their laments. And he also discovers there a lead
box of old papers. Slowly he reads them and finds they are the original
manuscript of Melville's Moby-Dick, long thought to have been lost in an
1850s fire at his publisher. The manuscript is valuable enough to save
the family's failing construction business if marketed properly. But
Arvin wants more and Professor Thorne is the Melville expert who can
help. Arvin and the professor take turns telling this tale with its
lyric resonances of Moby-Dick, the specter of the curse of Ahab and
strange deaths, and the scramble of greed as the manuscript becomes more
valuable by the hour.