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170th out of 187 books
—
140 voters
Spartina
by
John Casey
Winner of the 1989 National Book Award
A classic tale of a man, a boat, and a storm, Spartina is the lyrical and compassionate
story of Dick Pierce, a commercial fisherman along the shores of Rhode Island's
Narragansett Bay. A kind, sensitive, family man, he is also prone to irascible outbursts
against the people he must work for, now that he can no longer make his living from...more
A classic tale of a man, a boat, and a storm, Spartina is the lyrical and compassionate
story of Dick Pierce, a commercial fisherman along the shores of Rhode Island's
Narragansett Bay. A kind, sensitive, family man, he is also prone to irascible outbursts
against the people he must work for, now that he can no longer make his living from...more
Paperback, 384 pages
Published
April 28th 1998
by Vintage
(first published June 17th 1989)
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Nov 12, 2010
Alex
rated it
1 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
no one, except what not to read or write
Recommended to Alex by:
no one, luckily for them
Shelves:
chum-barrel
Over the past 15 years or so, I've managed to sprinkle into my reading diet 57 of the 67 National Book Award winners in Fiction. To date (late 2010), Spartina remains at the very bottom of the ones I've read (I'd have given it a ZERO if allowed). The back cover blurbs comparing it to Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea are decidedly offensive to anyone with an eye and mind for Literature (next to those masterworks, Spartina is just a guy and his dream of a boat FLUFF). To think that Casey's no...more
Very engaging reflection on the human condition wrapped in a nautical story set in the northeast. Everything about the choices each character made, and they way they presented themselves to one another was plausible and interesting. Occasionally, the poetry of their unspoken thoughts seemed a bit outside the average person's (i.e., not a great writer's) experience, but the words they uttered to express them scoped the ideas to human scale and believably propelled the story forward. My only quibb...more
Spartina by John Casey
I first was interested in the 2nd book of this series and was happy to learn that I could still buy the first book.
It's about Dick and he is a fisherman and he also has worked in various jobs around the shipyard. He knows how to do a lot of things besides being a fisherman, onshore and offshore and how to deliver boats to other locations, design his own boat but he
can't get the banks to loan him the money he needs to complete his big boat that he can then go offshore with t...more
I first was interested in the 2nd book of this series and was happy to learn that I could still buy the first book.
It's about Dick and he is a fisherman and he also has worked in various jobs around the shipyard. He knows how to do a lot of things besides being a fisherman, onshore and offshore and how to deliver boats to other locations, design his own boat but he
can't get the banks to loan him the money he needs to complete his big boat that he can then go offshore with t...more
I'm not sure why this book won the National Book Award. There are lots of well-written books published every year. I think the thing that sets this one apart is its depiction of a vanishing way of life - that of a New England man trying to make a living from the sea. I know the southern coast of New England intimately and grew up around men very much like the hero of this book, Dick Pierce. Mr. Casey has gotten the stubborn, non-verbal self-reliance of his protagonist exactly right, especially a...more
Casey, John. SPARTINA. (1989). ****.
Spartina is the name of a type of marsh grass that thrives in salty or brackish water, mostly on the East Coast of the U.S. It is also the name of the ship that the protagonist, Dick Pierce, is building for his own use. Pierce is a crotchety, forty-year-old fisherman from Rhode Island. He is married with two boys. He makes his living by renting himself out, plus a share, on various fishing boats. He fishes for lobster, crab, swordfish, and (don’t tell anyone)...more
Spartina is the name of a type of marsh grass that thrives in salty or brackish water, mostly on the East Coast of the U.S. It is also the name of the ship that the protagonist, Dick Pierce, is building for his own use. Pierce is a crotchety, forty-year-old fisherman from Rhode Island. He is married with two boys. He makes his living by renting himself out, plus a share, on various fishing boats. He fishes for lobster, crab, swordfish, and (don’t tell anyone)...more
One of the most satisfying novels I've read in the last year. I initially felt drawn to it for the direct, esoteric nautical information, and the vividness of the characters. Sort of feels like a working-class struggle-to-claw-out-of-misery story, like Upton Sinclair's THE JUNGLE. About a hundred pages in it veers into the subject of adultery, which brings about more ambiguity in the language and description (a good example of the sort of pretentious literary wordplay attacked by B.R. Myers in h...more
The reason I bought the book: The Book of the Year award it received.
The reason I stopped reading the book: The lackluster way in which the author treats infidelity.
Forget the award, forget the hype. The story of Dick Pierce (an intentional pun?) and his quest to finish building his perfect boat is the story of a man who grumps his way through existence, has a wife who loves him for - hell, I don't know what reason, and who can't seem to get his shit together. He's always searching for more mone...more
The reason I stopped reading the book: The lackluster way in which the author treats infidelity.
Forget the award, forget the hype. The story of Dick Pierce (an intentional pun?) and his quest to finish building his perfect boat is the story of a man who grumps his way through existence, has a wife who loves him for - hell, I don't know what reason, and who can't seem to get his shit together. He's always searching for more mone...more
Spartina was surprisingly good. I took a chance on it because it won the National Book Award (in 1989 or something). The book, according to its description, is about a Rhode Island fisherman, and it compared it to Moby Dick and the Old Man and the Sea (since those took place at sea). I wasn't really looking forward to reading it, but I decided to anyway.
Well, it started out a little slow, but around the 75 page mark I realized I was starting to enjoy the book a lot more, and by the midway point,...more
Well, it started out a little slow, but around the 75 page mark I realized I was starting to enjoy the book a lot more, and by the midway point,...more
A very interesting book and a fun read, with fascinating character development, even of the characters that you didn't like. However, I found the writing style in the beginning of the book to be rather frustrating. For some reason John Casey used pronouns about a quarter as often as normal, so there was far too much discussion of "Dick Pierce thought this" and "Dick did that." This may have been a stylistic decision to reflect the poorly communicating "swamp yankee" character of Dick Pierce, but...more
Dick Pierce is a fisherman in a small village in Rhode Island.
His family had owned land on a picturesque piece of land overlooking the water. He's angry that his father had to sell the land and now it's under plans for development.
Dick is also upset about his financial woes and inability to bring in enough money for his family and to complete the boat that he is building.
There is a message in this story about the difficulties of being a self-employed fisherman in New England.
The story also does...more
His family had owned land on a picturesque piece of land overlooking the water. He's angry that his father had to sell the land and now it's under plans for development.
Dick is also upset about his financial woes and inability to bring in enough money for his family and to complete the boat that he is building.
There is a message in this story about the difficulties of being a self-employed fisherman in New England.
The story also does...more
National book award winner in 1998. " a classic tale of a man, a boat, and a storm. Spartina is the lyrical and compassionate story of Dick Pierce, a commercial fisherman along the shores of Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay. A kind, sensitive family man, he is also prone to irascible outbursts against the people he must work for now that he can no longer make his living from the sea. His one great passion, a fifty-foot fishing boat called Spartina, lies unfinished in his back yard. Determined to...more
Spartina is the sort of book that made me fall in love with reading. Casey's rich prose style interlaced with poetic imagery fits the storyline well, focusing on Dick Pierce, life long resident of Matunuck Rhode Island and much like the hardy resilient sea grass that provides the book's title and the name of his boat which he is trying to get launched before labor day. There is more introspection here than usual, several set pieces that are written in a staccato style that give the story forward...more
Casey almost had a winner here, chock full of hearty chunks of Yankee realism. On one level it's a novel about work: How to build a lobster trap; how to survive a hurricane; what's the best way to smuggle cocaine into Narraganset Harbor? That's where Casey won the misleading comparison to Hemingway and Melville which adorns the novel's jacket. If only Elsie had been eaten by that shark on page whatever! Hey, I have no problem with love stories, but Casey's propeller gets wicked fouled up every t...more
Dick Pierce, fisherman and boat-builder, lives on the Rhode Island shore in a backwater world of salt marshes, alcoholic fishermen, crab boats and old homesteads disappearing under new resorts for inland tourists. A stubborn man thoughtful enough to know that the world is becoming too small for men like himself, Pierce has a mortgage, a family, a "puny income from lobstering" and a dream: to finish the half-built boat in his backyard so he can fish for red crabs out in deep water, make some real...more
Casey's novel about a struggling fisherman on Rhode Island started off strongly. His prose is similar to Richard Russo's, and he has a talent for depicting the salty New Englander. Unfortunately, it's impossible to believe the chain of events that lead to the climactic scene. If a survival at sea was what he deemed necessary to create a metaphor for Dick's personal upheavals, there were about a million other ways he could have written him into a storm. Also disappointing was the lack of developm...more
I often bristle when a book’s blurb says, “old fashioned fiction…a full-bodied novel,” because what I fear the blurbist means is “Don’t you just hate all that smart ass modernist and post-modernist crap?” For the record, I love modernists and postmodernists and post-post modernists. Nevertheless this novel won me over. I almost gave up on it about half way through but the characters began to take hold, especially the flawed protagonist and his “other woman” Elsie. Elsie brings the story a much n...more
His book exceeded my expectations. While there seemed to be flaws (namely the unrealistic, thoughtful, searching dialogue) the flaws were also strengths (the dialogue was interesting and thought provoking despite being unrealistic).
Given this brief summary, I am not surprised I didn't expect much from this book, but the writing is compelling, inviting the reader into the interesting minds of Dick and his lover. If anything the details about the boat, the fishing, etc. got to be somewhat tiresome...more
Given this brief summary, I am not surprised I didn't expect much from this book, but the writing is compelling, inviting the reader into the interesting minds of Dick and his lover. If anything the details about the boat, the fishing, etc. got to be somewhat tiresome...more
I said I wouldn't review Compass Rose until I read Spartina. It was a little odd reading Spartina after CR but also wonderful in a way. I had so many questions after reading CR and they were just about all answered in Spartina. Definitely recommend reading these as one big fat novel. Spartina is so much more than a 'sea story' which is how it's presented. It's about life in a small fishing town turning into summer vacationland, relationships - both personal and class. And about the sea and the l...more
A vivid, poignant and poetic novel. Set in South County, Rhode Island, it is a story centered on Dick Pierce; husband, father, fisherman, whose obsession with building a 50-foot boat drives the narrative. A good, hard-working and kind man, Dick Pierce is also hot-tempered, nettlesome and tough. Caught up in storms both natural and domestic, he is a man home at sea, adrift on land. Deeply felt and unexpected. Read this book
The best parts of this book were the ones about the man and his boat. Unfortunately too much time is spent in soulful conversations with a lover (a classy, well heeled woman who also happens to be a DNR officer!)and with the narrator telling us what his wife thinks. The character of the wife is almost an affront to wifedom - her face and personality are smudges here. We needed more Noah and less Freud.
I decided to read this book because it is set in the area that I recently moved to, southern RI. It was a quick read, and a reasonably good story, but I just don't think Casey's style is for me. I found it difficult to work up much sympathy or concern for the story's (anti) hero. Add to that the fact that Casey is found of florid interior monologues full of nautical metaphors, and you basically have the opposite of the unadorned style of writers who I admire like Raymond Carver or Andre Dubus. S...more
Once I read Compass Rose, I knew I had to read Spartina, written 20 years before with the same characters/setting. Now I'll read Compass Rose again! since I'll have a different perspective on the characters and their action. First though I plan on reading Casey's American Romance. His sense of place is vivid and his characters' actions are fascinating.
This seemed like John Steinbeck's take on a fisherman. The main character is as inherently good and hard-working and fustrated as Ethan Allen Hawley from "Winter of Our Discontent". He makes some bad choices in hopes of providing a better life for his family, and then realizes that sacrifices like he's made will never make anything better for anyone.
Winner of the 1989 National book Award. i was attracted to this book by a quote from the NYT Book Review - "Possibly the best American novel...since "The Old Man and the Sea," maybe even "Moby Dick." That says a lot to me. While a very good work, I am afraid the accolades are too intense.
Nowhere as sparse as Hemingway, or as intense as Melville, This is nonetheless a good example of the philosophical introspection common in much of modern literature, with an interesting story thrown in.
A man st...more
Nowhere as sparse as Hemingway, or as intense as Melville, This is nonetheless a good example of the philosophical introspection common in much of modern literature, with an interesting story thrown in.
A man st...more
This is set in South County Rhode Island and seemed as if the author was watching over our shoulders so of course I was enthralled. The setting and all was good. But the comparison to Melville or Hemingway is hardly accurate as mostly this seems like a story about a fairly dull man who should be nicer to his wife.
Meh. I gave it two stars instead of one because the plot itself was just good enough to keep you turning the pages. But I found the characters boring, winy, and shallow. And the conversations between the characters were incredibly boring and dull. In the end, while I was reading, all I could hear in my head was blah blah blah.
This would have been five stars if not for the Elsie plotline. The affair seemed to drag it back into a more predictable line of storytelling. The basic narrative of man wanting boat to save his life, drag him out of poverty, etc. is fascinating and gets lost for about 100 pages of the book, sadly. The class war stuff is worthy, but could have been done without Elsie.
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Brilliantly evocative work exploring relationships in a Rhode Island fishing village, complete with tangled threads of class and privilege, friendship and identity in a working class world. There's also a truly suspenseful hurricane sequence.
This is a beautiful book. It may have been dear to me in part because I'm from New England, where the book is set, and have spent a little time on the Atlantic/on boats there. But that's only part of what recommends it. The writing is quite elegant, the conundrums very human, the plot surprising, the relationships complex. Loved it! Couldn't put it down.
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Aug 07, 2012 04:46pm