Writing in The Atlantic last year, presumably while finishing work on “The Passages of H. M.,” a novel based on the life of Herman Melville, Jay Parini declared that the historical novel “has become our primary form of fiction.” The present, he speculated, “can seem too bright, too close,” requiring “the filter of memory” to sort out and deliver the profound insights readers hope to find in novels. Going a step farther, he argued that it is in fiction like Gore Vidal’s “Lincoln” or Russell Banks’s “Cloudsplitter” that “one gets ‘real’ history.”

Whatever else he may be, the Herman Melville of Parini’s “Passages” is a spokesman for the “fiction is more true than fact” camp. Organized as a series of episodes, many of them imaginative reconstructions of what may have transpired on Melville’s known sea voyages, “Passages” purports to reveal the workings of Melville’s mind as he finds his vocation as a writer. Aboard the whaling ship Acushnet as a 21-year-old, “Herman began to think about the nature of fiction,” and how it “echoed Truth back to itself in sharper, shapelier tones.” Later, on that same voyage, Melville tells a shipmate, who asks whether he plans to write a memoir using the journal in which he scribbles furtively at night, “Only novels tell the unadorned truth.”

“Everyone knows that the truth can’t be told, not in historical writing,” a well-read English sailor on Melville’s next ship, the Lucy Ann, counsels the aspiring author: “You have to make it up, else nobody will believe you.” Eventually the entire crew catches on, as Melville tries out his stories in nightly bull sessions, “expanding and contracting them as needed, enhancing their shape, sharpening their detail. . . . Nobody troubled to call him on the discrepancies, as they understood that truth requires a certain boldness of invention, a willingness to remake reality.” Whale ship as writers’ workshop!

But in this novel do we get at the truth of Herman Melville? Historical novelists speak of looking for a gap in the record of their subjects’ lives, a space bounded by fact but with plenty of room for fictional maneuvering, to serve as an entry point for an imagined narrative. Matthew Pearl took up the five “lost” days at the end of Edgar Allan Poe’s life, during which the dissolute poet disappeared from sight, for his literary thriller “The Poe Shadow.” In “The Master,” Colm Toibin chose the little-examined years when Henry James tried writing for the theater as an opening for his own masterly approximation of James’s psyche.