Spartina
by John Casey
Summary
Dick Pierce fishes pots and runs charters out of the salt ponds of South County, Rhode Island, a waterman from a family that once owned land the summer people now hold, and his grievance is structural: he knows the water better than anyone rich enough to enjoy it. In his backyard, on borrowed money and off hours, stands the hull of Spartina, the fifty foot fishing boat that is his one route to standing of his own, unfinished for want of a few thousand dollars he cannot honestly raise.
Casey builds the novel from work: hauling pots, reading weather, the geometry of hull and marsh, rendered so exactly that the book doubles as a manual of its world. The money comes the way it comes, a little poaching, a run of someone else's contraband, and alongside it arrives Elsie Buttrick, a natural resources officer from the gentry side of the pond, gone slightly rogue herself. Their affair, conducted in skiffs and spare hours while Dick's steady wife May holds the family, is written with unusual honesty about what it is and is not, and it leaves Elsie pregnant as the boat nears launch.
Then the hurricane, and the novel's great set piece: Dick takes Spartina to sea to save her, and rides out the storm in pages that earn every comparison they drew. What is left after, wreckage, a daughter, an accounting with May, the book settles with the patience of its tides.
Around three hundred and eighty pages.
Best for readers who want work, water and class done with a shipwright's precision, the maritime novel brought home to a marsh.
Historical Context & Significance
Spartina won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1989, and the New York Times Book Review supplied the blurb it has carried since, calling it possibly the best American novel about going fishing since The Old Man and the Sea. The grass of the title, spartina, is the salt marsh cordgrass that survives drowning twice a day, and reviewers did not miss the emblem.
John Casey, a Harvard Law graduate who fled the law for the Iowa Workshop, taught at Virginia for decades and worked the Rhode Island waters he wrote; the novel's authority is participatory, and its portrait of the shore's class fault line, watermen against summer money, has only sharpened as the real coast gentrified.
Casey published sparingly, a translator's patience applied to his own books, and returned to Dick and Elsie's world twenty one years later in Compass Rose, the sequel told from the women's side. Spartina remains the book: a single sustained performance, and one of the prize list's purest examples of the novel of competence.