I expected Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener to be revolutionary in tone: a fictional counterpart to Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy, with its disdain for work and its praise of leisure. The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for work: their slaves alone were permitted to labour; the free man knew only exercises for the body and mind, Lafargue writes.

But Bartleby is not an idler. He is something more disquieting. At the beginning of his employment as a scrivener, he performs an extraordinary quantity of writing. Then, asked to examine a document, he simply responds, “I would prefer not to.” From that moment, his eccentricity unfolds with a strange, unsettling persistence.

Melville conjures not only Bartleby but also the trio of Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut: copyists whose more predictable eccentricities only heighten Bartleby’s opacity. In just sixty-four pages, he compresses a narrative that resists interpretation, lingering long after it ends.