Lucchesi and The Whale is an unusual work of fiction by noted author and critic Frank Lentricchia. Its central character, Thomas Lucchesi Jr., is a college professor in the American heartland whose obsessions and compulsions include traveling to visit friends in their last moments of life--because grief alone inspires him to write--and searching for secret meaning in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Himself a writer of "stories full of violence in a poetic...