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Summary
Summary
It's been more than two decades since Spartina won the National Book Award and was acclaimed by critics as being "possibly the best American novel . . . since The Old Man and the Sea " ( The New York Times Book Review ), but in this extraordinary follow-up novel barely any time has passed in the magical landscape of salt ponds and marshes in John Casey's fictional Rhode Island estuary.
Elsie Buttrick, prodigal daughter of the smart set who are gradually taking over the coastline of Sawtooth Point, has just given birth to Rose, a child conceived during a passionate affair with Dick Pierce--a fisherman and the love of Elsie's life, who also happens to live practically next door with his wife, May, and their children. A beautiful but guarded woman who feels more at ease wading through the marshes than lounging on the porches of the fashionable resort her sister and brother-in-law own, Elsie was never one to do as she was told. She is wary of the discomfort her presence poses among some members of her gossipy, insular community, yet it is Rose, the unofficially adopted daughter and little sister of half the town, who magnetically steers everyone in her orbit toward unexpected--and unbreakable--relationships. As we see Rose grow from a child to a plucky adolescent with a flair for theatrics both onstage and at home during verbal boxing matches with her mother, to a poised and prepossessing teenager, she becomes the unwitting emotional tether between Elsie and everyone else. "Face it, Mom," Rose says, "we live in a tiny ecosystem." And indeed, like the rugged, untouched marshes that surround these characters, theirs is an ecosystem that has come by its beauty honestly, through rhythms and moods that have shaped and reshaped their lives.
With an uncanny ability to plunge confidently and unwaveringly into the thoughts and desires of women--mothers, daughters, wives, lovers--John Casey astonishes us again with the power of a family saga.
Author Notes
John Casey was born in 1939 in Worcester, Massachusetts. He received a B.A. from Harvard College in 1962, a LLB from Harvard Law School in 1965, and M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1968. He is a professor of English literature at the University of Virginia.
He is also a novelist and translator. His novel Spartina, a classic tale of a man, a boat, and a storm, won the National Book Award in 1989. His other works include The Half-Life of Happiness, An American Romance, and Compass Rose.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Casey tepidly returns to characters orbiting Rhode Island fisherman Dick Pierce, the lynchpin of his 1989 National Book Award-winning novel, Spartina, in this uneven outing. Game warden Elsie Buttrick has just given birth to Dick's illegitimate daughter, Rose, and over the next 16 years the fiercely independent Elsie grapples with motherhood, aging, and love, and throws herself into a crusade to stop her land-grabbing brother-in-law from expanding his seaside resort. Meanwhile, Dick's wife, May, reconciles a public humiliation with an intense love for Rose. As Elsie's lust flares, May sinks deeper into her devotion to her children and Rose. Though the lyrical narrative has strong roots in the women's interiors, it's the connectedness of their "tiny ecosystem" that the book best evokes. Yet plodding moments-clearing a field of stones, for example-slow the pace, and the omission of many potentially dramatic scenes-a father admitting his infidelities to his sons, a woman capitulating to a landowner's demands-limit the story's emotional range. While fans of Casey's previous books will enjoy this encore, many readers will be left lukewarm by the lack of narrative consequence. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
In this sequel to the author's National Book Award-winning Spartina (1989), Natural Resources warden Elsie Buttrick is forced to grapple with the fallout from her affair with Rhode Island fisherman Dick Pierce. As the novel opens, Elsie has just given birth to their daughter, Rose. Over the next 16 years, Elsie reins in her fierce love for the taciturn Dick, is grateful for his wife's love and acceptance of Rose, must deal with the insular nature of a community well aware of her daughter's illegitimate birth, and, finally, must convince her daughter that she is her biggest fan. Elsie also becomes consumed by her brother-in-law's greedy development schemes, which are slowly transforming the landscape she knows and loves so well while displacing longtime residents. With its emotionally intricate interior monologues and many complicated relationships among multiple characters, this is a novel best suited to those who have read Spartina. They will most readily appreciate Casey's rich paean to the prideful seaside residents of a Rhode Island community and their long and tangled history with the land and with each other.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHERE are we? Answers drift across the woods and salt marshes in John Casey's beautiful, elegiac new novel. One person after another takes a bearing, sets a course, loses the way, makes a correction. "Compass Rose" is the story of a handful of people who live in a small coastal community in Rhode Island's South County. Yet this bit of a world is complete unto itself, with its own force fields, its own variations off true north, its own ways of tilting into alignment. Like the love affair that is the novel's magnetic pole, "Compass Rose" gathers its quiet strength from a slow accretion of instants of intimacy "both ferocious and serene," moments that bubble up, collapse and decompose in the natural order of things, on their way to becoming the history of a place. It is useless and truly beside the point, in a book of such compacted sweep, to condense the plot. Events are not what drive this narrative; people are. As in all lives, important things happen, as do banal things. Money, power, nature, lust and greed exert an irresistible pull. Trouble rises up, disturbs and dislocates, and then everything settles down. "Compass Rose" continues a story that Casey began in "Spartina" just over 20 years ago. The setting is "a tiny ecosystem," complains the angry, adolescent Rose of the new novel's title. Her mother, Elsie, is a single woman who secretly, willfully became pregnant during an affair with a struggling fisherman named Dick, a married father whom she wanted "for the certainty of his fierce instincts." But when Dick first lays eyes on his infant daughter, whose paternity is at that point still a secret, he becomes unsettled, unsure of where he is. Quietly, deliberately, he backs off, recalibrates. Elsie is a natural resources officer for the state, "the warden of the Great Swamp," as her friends joke. Possessed of a primal sense of the rhythms of life and death, she has "the righteousness of being one of those who knew that order." This affinity is something she shares with Dick; in fact, it is "the innermost justifying of her love." They remain apart, yet they constantly pull toward each other. "You're here. You're part of here," Dick tells her. "We're part of here." Their affair began in "Spartina," and although "Compass Rose" stands on its own, I recommend reading the two novels back to back. "Spartina" is Dick's story, the tale of a man more comfortable at sea than on land, a man who builds a boat strong and nimble enough to ride out a lethal hurricane. In "Compass Rose," it's the landbound women who drive the story. Elsie's friend Mary, "busting into every life but her own," is a gifted cook, comfortable in the heat and bustle of a kitchen. Mary moves in with Elsie to help raise her daughter, and she is the friend to whom Rose turns when her relationship with her mother becomes brutally fractious. Dick's wife, May, is estranged by her husband's affair, but even more so by his inability to understand or appreciate her. During dinner, he looks at her "from far away, the table's length like a stretch of water between them." May is a homemaker, the parent who principally raised their two sons. Struggling to forgive her husband, she feels desperately alone: "Dick had a whole stretch of sea to roam around in, . . . and she hadn't gone very far from where she started, just stayed at home. Imagining her life becoming bigger made her dizzy. But at the same time she felt less at the mercy of unhappiness." It is May who takes the biggest risk, opening her heart to Rose, welcoming her to her household. All around them, the natural order of things in South County is being upended. Fisheries are collapsing; land has more value as real estate than pasture. The disruptions of class snobbery have snaked their way into a place where creeks and ponds bear the names of families now barely able to hold on to their patch of earth. It's a world divided between people like Elsie, who raise their children "so they can go anywhere," and those like Dick and May, who intend to stay for generations more. One of the novel's loveliest, most prickly characters is Miss Perry, the grande dame of South County, a founder of the private academy Elsie attended - and the Latin teacher who introduced her to the beauty and mysteries of nature. Now, though, it's hard for Miss Perry to move through the world; even an outing to a baseball game is a victory. Slipping into a fragile old age, "she found herself staring at things, simultaneously puzzled by how particular a leaf was and how unbordered and vague she herself was becoming." When Miss Perry suffers a stroke, it is the decay of language that most unhinges her. She dreams that death is the loss of grammar and convinces herself that when she is able to get out of bed and move around her grasp of prepositions will improve. Her hope is that Elsie will become "a more reflective tutelary spirit," just as she herself has been South County's conscience, its memory. "You can be a better form of what I have tried to be," Miss Perry tells her. "If I had to say in a single phrase what my life has been, it is this - a love affair with this small piece of rock-strewn woods and ponds, and the people who truly live in it." Casey's portrayal of that patch of South County is carefully observed, lovingly rendered and delicately parsed - a full-throated celebration of the natural world. For Elsie, "any patch of ground was web upon web of awareness." When she is in the swamp, she knows "more than she could name," a state of being that is a prelude to coming into grace. In one scene I'll think about for some time to come, Elsie watches a blacksnake climb the "soot-gray bark" of a tall black locust to reach a hole in the trunk where birds have nested. A bluebird flutters nearby in a "moth... frenzy," chirping frantically but ineffe... ally as the snake slithers into the ne... inches of its tail hanging out. Elsie cl... the tree, clutching a flashlight, and fin... the snake with "two tiny claws sticking out of its mouth. The snake rippled, and the claws moved an inch farther into the gape." She sees a bulge in the snake, and the tiny motion of one last featherless nestling still alive at the back of the hole. The snake isn't evil; it's just doing what snakes do. Life will be renewed. "But what she had seen - the slow swallowing of flesh and bones, the peristalsis she'd only read about and imagined in pale abstraction - now it was hers." The compass rose is an ancient and beautiful figure that marks the angular differences between cardinal and magnetic directions, north, south, east and west. Theoretically, the compass rose is now embedded in almost all navigational systems - it locates us. Any seafarer knows constantly to ask the question, "Where am I?" To ignore the answer is to put one's life at peril. But this question is also urgent for anyone trying to chart a course through daily life. We need our inner compasses: where you are is who you are. Long after reading the last pages of "Compass Rose," I'm still thinking about how we establish ourselves as one another's magnetic directions - and hold fast. The novel hinges on two love affairs, one illicit and one with a 'piece of rock-strewn woods and ponds.' Dominique Browning, the author of the memoir "Slow Love," writes a column for the Environmental Defense Fund and blogs at SlowLoveLife.com.
Kirkus Review
Casey (The Half-Life of Happiness, 1998, etc.) revisitsSpartina(1989)territorycoastal Rhode Islandto see what his characters have been up to.Spartinawon theNationalBook Award, and the author turns the spotlight on Elsie Buttrick, mother of infant Rose. Elsie helps take care of old Miss Perry, her former Latin teacher, whose dialogue is sprinkled with poetic and classical allusions. In addition, Elsie is a natural resources officer, greatly concerned with proper stewardship of the marshland and wildlife around South County. Most significant is that she's an unwed motherRose's father is Dick Pierce, owner ofthe boatSpartina. Dick's wife May is understandably unsettled and quietly infuriated by her husband's infidelity, though eventually she comes to love Rose as dearly as Charlie and Tom, her sons by Dick. Elsie's sister Sally is married to Jack Aldrich, a slick lawyer and mover and shaker in the community. Over the years he's slowly been acquiring land for development and has decided that he wants the tract where Dick and May live. Rose eventually becomes a scholarship student at a local school and begins to assert herself through her musical gifts, but she also becomes a fairly unruly adolescent of great concern to her mother. In one tense episode May hears that theSpartinahas wrecked, and at first she has no news about her husband. Complicating the issue: On the boat, Jack and Sally's son is a crewman with little practical experience. (His father had little to teach him because he has always been more comfortable as aposeur, parading about in his nautical blazer at the local country club.) The story moves along at a leisurely pace that allows us to see the complexity and subtlety with which these characters interact. While nothing in the plot is ever quite resolved, the characters ultimately become more self-aware.Casey writes old-fashioned novels in the best sensecharacter-driven, thick with dialogue, nuanced and multilayered as they reveal relationships.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This is the highly anticipated second book in a projected trilogy that opened with Spartina, a National Book Award winner in 1989. Whereas Spartina unfurls the complicated life of Dick Pierce and the events leading up to his infidelity, this novel's protagonist is Elsie, with whom Dick had an affair. As the mother of Dick's child, Elsie finds herself navigating her own life through the spaces of Dick's wife, May; Dick's sons, Jack and Charlie; and Dick and Elsie's child, Rose. The result is a well-crafted story of a woman seeking acceptance from both her daughter and the family of the man she seduced, with the characters all serving to highlight Casey's implicitly stated metaphor that relationships of all stripes are as complicated as the vagaries of the open sea. VERDICT Readers unfamiliar with Spartina will have misgivings about the abbreviated introduction of characters, which confuses the tensions among them. However, the enrichment of these complications is what makes Casey's latest effort a challenging and enjoyable read. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/10.]-Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One May sat on the first row of the bleachers, watching the boys warm up. Tom was the second-string catcher, might get in if their team got ahead by a lot. He was good behind the plate-all that practice catching for Charlie in the backyard-but he couldn't hit as well as the first-string catcher. At least Charlie and Tom got to play on a team this year. Before Dick got his boat built he'd kept them busy during the summer doing chores. No games. And while Eddie Wormsley was fixing the house, they'd helped with that. Now there was some pleasure in their lives. Dick still expected them to work at something that brought in some money, but since he was at sea more than half the time, Charlie set his own schedule. He used the work skiff the same way Dick used to-had his tongs, pots, hand lines. Tom at fourteen was an off-the-books boy at the boatyard, but they didn't keep him half as busy as Dick used to. No question about it, the boys were better off. If you just counted material things, so was she. She took some comfort from the boys. Across the bright green grass she saw Miss Perry walking with her cane. The woman beside her was holding a parasol over Miss Perry's head. May didn't recognize Elsie Buttrick at first because she was wearing a white dress and looked a little plump. May's memory of Elsie was of her in a tailored green uniform or in a swimsuit. Miss Perry and Elsie moved very slowly. Part of May's mind was piecing together how and why they were here. A more powerful feeling rose through her, making her back and arms rigid. The feeling was nonsense but so strong that she couldn't stop it-she felt that she was the one who'd done something wrong. And everyone was about to see it. Miss Perry stopped to switch her cane to her other side. Elsie switched the parasol from one hand to the other and moved around Miss Perry. Elsie saw May and opened her free hand-perhaps to show she couldn't help being there. Then she looked down. May was released from her upside-down feeling. She looked to see if Charlie or Tom had noticed Miss Perry. No. She was alone for more of Miss Perry's and Elsie's slow progress. She herself was throwing off thoughts faster than she could gather them back in. She was trying to gather them so that she would leave no part of herself outside her. But there was another: a white dress. Had that woman worn that white dress when she was with Dick? Or was it to pretend she was Miss Perry's nurse? May's thoughts were like a dog's bristling and barking at something coming toward the front yard where it was chained up short. She'd caught a glimpse of Elsie Buttrick one summer at a clambake on Sawtooth Island, the local gentry walking around in next to nothing while Dick and the boys were fixing the clambake. May didn't stay. Something she hadn't remembered till now: Dick had said afterward that he thought Charlie had a crush on Elsie Buttrick. That was an idea that was so barbed and tangled that she pulled it inside her and covered it. And sat still. Miss Perry and Elsie arrived. May got up, shook hands with Miss Perry, nodded toward Elsie. Miss Perry said, "I told Charlie that I doubted that I would be able to go fishing this year, but that I hoped he and Tom would come for lunch. He then very nicely asked me to the baseball game." May concentrated on the slow rise and fall of Miss Perry's voice. Miss Perry's eyes widened as if with surprise behind her eyeglasses. She said, "And here I am." Miss Perry put both hands on the crook of her cane and added, "I'm afraid I dragooned Elsie into driving me." She put the tip of her cane behind the bench and began to sit down. Elsie got behind her, turned her, and lowered her by her elbows. May felt calmed by Miss Perry's stately sentences and by the way her presence lessened the Buttrick girl, maybe even contained her. Then May blamed herself for not thinking of Miss Perry's effort in coming out to the game, for not being concerned about how Miss Perry had aged in the last year. May said, "The boys'll be glad you're here. Charlie's going to pitch. We might get to see Tom a little later. Baseball's the first thing they've done on their own, if you see what I mean." Miss Perry turned to her. "I do indeed. Dick is admirably industrious, but I imagine he may have been demanding in his single-mindedness. Now that he's achieved his own boat, however, one might hope that he will become a bit more like Captain Teixeira. Perhaps not immediately, of course." Miss Perry gave a little cough, perhaps a laugh. Elsie looked straight ahead during Miss Perry's speech. Miss Perry said, "I don't intend that remark as a criticism of Dick but simply as a looking forward to spring after a hard winter." The game began. May hadn't seen a ball game for years-the last one probably a Red Sox game on someone's TV. She was surprised by a terrible tenderness for these teenagers assuming the gestures of grown men: the batter knocking the bat against his spikes and then tapping it on home plate. The infielders crouching, pounding their fists in their mitts. And Charlie on the mound staring intently at the catcher, shaking off a sign with a single shake of his head-the most grown-up gesture she'd ever seen him make. And the chatter. Their voices had all changed but were still not men's voices. Still thin and sometimes sweet tenors even though they were trying to be menacing or scornful. "No hitter, no hitter, easy out, easy out." "Whaddya say, whaddya say, Charlie boy, right by him, right down the old alley." High-school boys on a Saturday morning yearning to be men. In their green hearts, wanting to be like Dick-strong, secretive, hard. She'd seen moving pictures of a crew at sea sorting fish dumped on the deck out of the cod end, using their gloved hands or gaffs to throw the good fish into the hold, using their boots to kick the trash fish off the stern. These boys, the green field, the summer clouds in the blue sky, poured into her eyes too brightly. She tried to think of something sensible to say to Miss Perry. Miss Perry was staring intently at Charlie on the pitcher's mound, and May felt a little better. Chapter Two Miss Perry had felt Elsie's restlessness as they drove to the ball field-at first Miss Perry thought it was Elsie's thinking about other things she ought to be doing. Miss Perry had a regular driver on weekdays and hadn't asked a favor of Elsie for months, and Elsie had seemed pleasantly agreeable when Miss Perry asked in a general way if Elsie could spare a few hours of her Saturday morning. But as they walked toward the seats Miss Perry felt Elsie's nerves harden quite suddenly. And then May seemed withdrawn, too, and Miss Perry wondered, could Elsie in the course of her duties as warden have caught Dick when he was up to something with that friend of his, Mr. Wormsley? Or could May resent the way Elsie's brother-in-law had taken over Sawtooth Point and was making into an offensively private domain what had once been perfectly nice fields belonging to Dick's great-uncle Arthur? Which would have been Dick's, had Arthur Pierce not had a run of bad luck?. . . But surely May would know-Dick certainly did-that of all that family, Elsie was the one who'd come to care wholeheartedly for the place and the people. Perhaps this not knowing was simply another effect of age. Miss Perry had once known everything-almost everything-that went on in South County. Of course, she used to see Captain Teixeira more frequently when Everett Hazard was still alive. Among the three of them, they could register incidents from Wickford to Westerly. Now there were a great many details that escaped her. It wasn't just that Everett Hazard was dead; her own attention floated outward-she could think of no other way of putting it-floated outward beyond the things she once knew. It was not an altogether unpleasant sensation. She found herself staring at things, simultaneously puzzled by how particular a leaf was and how unbordered and vague she herself was becoming. On a good day, that is. She had felt that today was to be a good day. She had been very pleased by Charlie's telephone call. He was shy at first but soon warmed. And most pleasant of all, he seemed sure of her affection for him. That was the point of arranging to be here. She had breakfasted well and cleaned her eyeglasses, and there Charlie was in the middle of the baseball field, looking quite splendid. Baseball was as familiar to her as a shadow play. She knew there were long periods of apparently unproductive pitching and catching and then suddenly a single player might hit the ball and confront another single player of the array of players spread out on the field in an abruptly terrifying instant. She thought this game gave a nervous edge to the otherwise tranquil and consoling line "They also serve who only stand and wait." She was glad that Charlie had a repetitively active part. For a while she enjoyed watching him throw the baseball again and again, starting with a single elaborately slow step and then a quick whirl. Her mind wandered. The bakery had delivered the cake for Charlie and Tom, but had she put it in the refrigerator? Ought she have done so? She adjusted her eyeglasses and found herself admiring the catcher bravely crouched close behind the bat. She remembered a poem by Marianne Moore that mentioned the attractive curve of a catcher's haunches. Indeed. And somehow this was made more noticeable by the mask that covered his face, reminding her of a gladiator. The batter swung and the catcher threw off his mask and ran directly toward her, his face tilted up. When he was almost at arm's length from her he reached up with both hands. She heard a distinct thwock, but she couldn't see anything but Elsie's white dress. Then she saw Elsie and the catcher tipping sideways until they were on the ground at her feet. The catcher raised his glove with the ball in it, apparently to show the umpire, although the gesture also elicited applause from the audience and cheers from his teammates. The catcher got to his feet, asked Elsie if she was all right, then hauled her to her feet with one hand. Elsie smiled at the boy. Miss Perry was reminded of Elsie's smile as a girl. Never what anyone would call a sweet child, she would sometimes be surprised into a brief energetic smile. A charming paradox-Elsie's eyes would almost shut, but her face opened. As it did now. How very nice, how very much like pleasure. May didn't see the ball, but when the catcher got close to them the tilt of his body began to scare her. He shuffled nearer and nearer, then turned his back. May felt the bench jounce as Elsie got up. Elsie stood in front of Miss Perry with one hand in the air and the other on the catcher's back. As he caught the ball he began to fall. May felt the bench move again as Elsie braced a foot on it and pushed against the boy. Elsie and he sank sideways and then lay together on the ground. For an instant May saw Elsie as shameless-clutching him, pressing her hips and breasts against him. Then May was ashamed. She saw Charlie standing just beyond Elsie and the catcher. He closed his mouth and his face settled. Elsie was on her feet, smoothing her dress. The catcher jogged toward the umpire, who was listening stolidly to the coach of the other team. Charlie took a step closer to Elsie. Elsie waved one hand and said, "Fine. We're all fine." Charlie said, "Ma, maybe you and Miss Perry ought to move back a couple of rows." May thought there was no end to Elsie Buttrick. The people in the row behind them made room. May and Elsie stood Miss Perry up, turned her around, and guided her up to the next level. When Dick got home Charlie would tell him about the ball game, would tell him Elsie Buttrick had saved Miss Perry from being landed on by the catcher. May didn't want to be there to see Dick's careful face. May was pleased when Miss Perry said, "Really, Elsie. All this fuss?" Miss Perry thought the game had gone on quite long enough. She thought Charlie himself looked as if pitching was becoming tiresome. He took several deep breaths and threw the ball. There was a sound as sharp as when the catcher caught the ball in front of her, but more resonant. "Blow, bugle, blow-set the wild echoes flying." Tennyson? She looked up and saw the ball suspended against the blue sky. She said "Ah!" as it began to move. She was surprised that she could see it so clearly, that she felt so light and connected to that single speck, as though she herself were flying. She was startled to find that she was standing, Elsie's arm around her waist. She lost sight of the ball against a cloud, then saw it fall out of the cloud. A faraway player leaned against a fence and watched the ball land. Two little boys beyond the fence began to run toward it. The first time it landed it skipped quite high, as though it might fly again. Then it bounced gently. Miss Perry was glad to see this-one of the boys caught it and the two of them ran off with it. She sat down again with Elsie's help. It had been as thrilling as when she'd surprised a stag in her garden and he'd bolted with a snort that froze her in place. Then he leapt over the high stone wall, as if lifted by a wave. How much invisible energy there was in this world- how amazing to feel it press through her still. She applauded. Elsie touched her arm and asked her if she would like a glass of lemonade. She said, "Not now, Elsie." May said, "Poor Charlie," and Miss Perry knew-had only temporarily not known-that this splendid moment was unfortunate for Charlie. In fact, after he watched two of the opposing players trot around the bases, there was a gathering around him and a new pitcher replaced him. There was a smattering of applause as he left the field. From the Trade Paperback edition. Excerpted from Compass Rose by John Casey All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
