“Call me Ishmael.” is the tight and intriguing opening line of Moby Dick. It’s one of those really memorable opening lines like, “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” Unfortunately, just like A Tale of Two Cities, after the opening line, Moby Dick is no fun at all.

There is a slight glimmer of hope at the beginning of the book that it might not be THAT bad. The reader meets a raw-meat-eating, tattooed, noble savage who does things like shave with a harpoon head. He and Ishmael carry on a slightly fruity relationship. It’s cute enough. But then the book starts hammering away at the reader.

The book starts its destruction of the reader’s sensibilities by eliminating stuff like dialogue and action. This is a book that is over 500 pages, and I would wager that there are no more than 20-odd pages of dialogue. The rest of the book is made up of long excursuses on topics such as the differences between Grampus and Black Fish whales and clam and fish chowder, and why white is a really creepy color. The structure is unforgiving as well. The paragraphs frequently run for entire pages, there are 135 separate chapters (two that inexplicably share the same title: “Knights and Squires”) and footnotes on fascinating subjects like polar bears and albatrosses. Maybe Melville was just trying to make his style as bloated as the whales he was writing about.

When Melville does get around to telling the story, it’s about a crazy-assed captain who wants to kill the whale who took his leg. So, it’s sort of like Jaws 4: The Revenge, except reversed. Also, unlike Jaws 4—there’s no Mario Van Peebles in it—which is one of the few good things I can say about Moby Dick.

The star here is craaaazy ol’ Ahab, and Melville gets around to introducing him for the first time on page 129. Thanks, Herman. After that, the book is an epic saga, a realistic story of whaling, a romance of unusual adventure and weird characters, a symbolic allegory, and a drama of heroic determination and conflict. I guess. Truth is, I just plagiarized that word for word off the back cover. I couldn’t tell you what allegories are found in this book to save my life. The page-long paragraphs made my eyes glass over, and all I really can tell you is that there’s a whale, a captain, the ship takes off for a three-year tour, it seems to take that long to read it, and some stuff happens along the way and it’s s’posed to mean somethin’. Jesus, stop pestering me for the meaning. Isn’t it bad enough that I read this garbage?

In short, call me Mike. Call me Michael. Hell, call me Ishmael. Just don’t call me back to any Melville work ever again.