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 the sea.

Pierce's one great passion, a fifty-foot fishing boat called Spartina, lies unfinished in his back yard. Determined to get the funds he needs to buy her engine, he finds himself taking a foolish, dangerous risk. But his real test comes when he must weather a storm at sea in order to keep his dream alive. Moving and poetic, Spartina is a masterly story of one man's ongoing struggle to find his place in the world.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, Book Club, Literary Fiction, Literature, The United States Of America

375 pages, Paperback

First published June 17, 1989

About the author

John Dudley Casey was an American novelist and translator. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1989 for Spartina.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 4 out of 5]

*****National Book Award Winner for 1989*****

”He could forget everything he’d thought here, this night, in the middle of his life. Let it ebb, and it would flow back. He felt like the salt marsh, the salt pond at high water, brimming.”



Dick Pierce wakes up angry, finds new things to get mad about as the day goes by, and goes to bed furious. He is surprised whenever someone has the nerve to actually point out his bad humor to him. He will admit to being a little grumpy, but angry... well... that is a little harder for him to accept.

Here are a few things that irritate Dick like slivers of bamboo stuck under his fingernails.

His father and uncle had once owned a good chunk of the picturesque fishing village of Galilee, Rhode Island. His father’s battle with cancer had necessitated selling most of it piece by piece. Dick inherited a slender slice of land just large enough to build a modest house on.

Rich people start buying up land in the village and using Galilee as their playground.

He is building a boat that will make it possible for him to finally start making a decent living fishing. He won’t have to split down his catch with anyone else. He’s a few thousand dollars short of finishing it. He’s even bent the law a time or so to try and get that big score that will enable him to buy those final pieces that will float his boat.

His wife, May, doesn’t hate the boat, but she can’t stand the thought of another season with him moping around, grumpy, cantankerous, and peevish. She wants him to borrow the money from Miss Perry, the local aristocracy.

He says hell no. Pride keeps him poor.

He’s got a mistress. He didn’t want no goddamn girlfriend, but there it is. She’s lovely and young, and she’s had a crush on him since she was little. Elsie is from family money. She is like stealing a piece of candy that he can’t afford. She seduced him. The power of seduction is that someone finds us desirable. We are all susceptible to it. He could have said no, but then you can ask the rain to fall up instead down, but the rain will still come down.

There is an ”erotic shimmer” about being at her house that for a while, before guilt starts to shove a harpoon into his liver over and over again, makes him feel languid for probably the first time in his adult life.

He has two boys, sweet boys, who admire him and want to be more like him. Most times when they ask to come and help, he says no. May frets about them getting hurt, but it is more about him being alone with his anger, that burning fire that makes him try harder and harder, even though a part of him doesn’t believe it is possible for him to succeed. He doesn’t want to infect his sons with the fever that burns off of him like melted wax.

He’s hard on his sons. He’s hard on his friend Eddie, who would do anything for him. He’s hard on himself. He is always shaking his fist in the air at the forces that conspire against him. He pushes everyone away from him and asking for help sticks in his craw like a heavy black stone. He borrows money because even he is starting to realize that he doesn’t have the fortitude to go much longer, but it pisses him off. It is like a concession, like he isn’t fighting it anymore, like he is just accepting things like a normal person. He is Dick Pierce, a man who must slay a dragon every day.

”Make it perfect, Dick thought. Be dumb-ass sullen with Eddie, a son of a bitch to May and the boys, leave them working, go off and topple Elsie one more time and take her money too. Along with the old lady’s when she’s out of her mind. Perfect.”

There have been comparisons to The Old Man and the Sea, but instead of a fish and sharks, Dick is fighting a hurricane. How goddamn perfect! Finally, the universe is stepping out of the shadows and taking him on one on one. He has to save his boat. There is no starting over. If he loses, the sea can have his corpse and be welcome to it.

Fishermen and farmers could set down at a table together and have a lot to talk about. They are gamblers, first and foremost, men who roll the dice every day by pitting themselves against mother nature. They can work harder and increase their chances of success, but the fickleness of these professions is that the weather or a changing water temperature can negate all their hard work and turn a year lean. They need a pretty girl blowing on the dice every throw.

Growing up on a farm, I met Dick Pierce, his name might have been Jack Eggers or Bill Monday or Ted Tolliver, but he was the same guy. They are grumpy by nature because they feel like happiness is equivalent to holding a golf club in the air during a thunderstorm. Sure let the powers that be have a free shot at ya. There are readers that find him impossible. They have to chuck the book aside. They can’t abide his anger. They can’t stand his rudeness. They can’t relate to him. They can’t respect him.

I can’t help but respect him.

He girds his loins everyday. He doesn’t know what easy is, and when something goes right, he can’t relax about it because that just means two things are going to go wrong. Living inside his head isn’t duck soup. Steam escapes his ears, so he doesn’t boil over. His flaws are like shattered pieces that have calved off an iceberg. They bob around him, silent, deadly, waiting for one wrong turn to sink him. Everyone deserves better from him, but he just can’t let the spool inside him unwind enough to be that human. He is a black coffee man, but Elsie is putting creamer in his cup. ”He felt rotten with his secret sweet.”

He don’t give a goddamn if you like him, but just stay the hell out of his way.

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[Jim Fonseca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spartina received the National Book Award when it was published in 1989. It deals a lot with one great American literary theme: class. Our hero is a decidedly cross Rhode Island waterman who would have been called “crotchety” in old Yankee culture. He lives hand to mouth, relying on the day’s catch of lobster, clams, crabs or swordfish and his wife’s garden to support his family – a wife and two boys. Meanwhile he pours his heart and soul into building his own wooden commercial fishing boat. The class theme cuts across his life: the guy out raking clams and pulling lobster pots is always the guy at the bottom of the economic totem pole. When he worked at a boat yard, he worked mainly on rich guys boats, of course, and that rankles. The upper crust around him is buying up his old family land for high-end waterfront and water view homes. If only his father didn’t have to sell the land years ago to make ends meet…..

Our hero is also having an affair -- upper crust, educated New England gal meets blue collar “swamp Yankee.” Our hero turns anti-hero in the affairs department. He doesn’t have a clue about romance. A guy with dirt under his nails from tuning up his diesel engine just doesn’t make it in the wine and roses department. There’s also an inherent, let’s call it “vocational tension” in the affair between the woman, a natural resources officer, and a guy who skirts around the environmental laws to put food on the family table. He even does a little part-time drug smuggling to make ends meet, but since he’s basically one of the good guys, the author lets us see how he was kind of “dragged into it.” The chapter where our hero rides out a hurricane in his newly-launched boat ranks right up there with classic passages in sea literature. In 2010 Casey released a sequel, Compass Rose, and I look forward to reading it.

[Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Spartina, Dick Pierce is trying to support himself and his family by catching lobster and crab off the coast of Rhode Island. He has tried working for others, but it never lasts. Either he gets fed up or more frequently others get fed up with him. Dick is an angry middle-aged white man. His wife and mother of his two boys, May, is clearly a good person. Dick’s two boys are good kids. It is a bit difficult to understand what Dick is angry about. There is some mention of class differences, but Dick really seems to be angry because he can’t achieve the success he wants. But whenever someone tries to help him, he finds a reason why their offer conflicts with his personal moral code. Any success must be achieved completely on his own. Dick is building a boat in his back yard that will provide him with the ability to bring in enough lobster, crab and swordfish to take care of his family, but he is having trouble financing its completion.

Apparently, Dick Pierce is supposed to be some type of American anti-hero. He wants to be completely independent. He looks down on most people and makes it difficult for anyone to like him. I found it hard to like Dick or to cheer for him. Many of us encounter these challenges in life where we must balance our personal integrity with the goals we want to achieve. I know I had my struggles of this type, so in this manner I could relate to Dick. However, the sacrifices he must make don’t seem very significant in comparison with what he can accomplish for himself and his family. I think the expression “he is his own worst enemy” is appropriate here.

What I really appreciated about this novel were the descriptions of the Rhode Island coast, the fishing industry, the boats, the waterways and the challenges these independent fishermen faced. Many readers, including me, say one of the reasons they read is to experience places and ways of life that they would otherwise never have the chance to experience. This book gave me that.

[Lori Widmer Bean · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 money - from his fishing and clamming to poaching and getting involved in drug running on occasion. You want to root for him because he's the protagonist, but you just don't care enough.

However, I stopped reading it when the author matter-of-factly threw in an affair between the protagonist and a female he'd known since childhood. It didn't ring true to the character, who seemed not to connect with anyone or anything beyond that boat. And now suddenly he's in bed with another woman and pouring his heart out? Maybe it's because he's such an unlovable person in general, but I found that betrayal of his wife, who plays a nearly invisible role in the book, too much for me to care anymore about what this guy does or what happens to him.

And I found it equally odd that the author took such great pains to describe prostitutes "teaching" sex ed at Deerfield Academy. Did someone's application for admission get overlooked? It was such a prolonged and deliberate description that I had to wonder.

[Tex · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a mediocre novel. I can't believe it won the National Book Award. There must be a story to that. Repetitive, full of endless seafaring analogies, plot not interesting (angry working man strives for more! Cheats on wife! Everything works out in the end!). Don't you believe the quote on the front that this is the best thing since old man and the sea and moby dick. That's laughable.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 time his protagonist stops doing stuff and sets down with his special lady friend. "Time slowed up. Then without moving, time slipped both ways at once...The future was nearby-for a moment he thought he was there too, or maybe he'd been there and back. He felt that future the way he felt the past still. All at once." Yeah, I think I get it...No, sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about. Is this supposed to be a reference to H. G. Wells? Time sure slowed up all right. How many pages left?

[Irene · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the story of a bitter middle aged struggling New England fisherman. In the relative short time we engage with him, his life seems to be spinning as fiercely as the hurricane wants to spin his boat. But, somehow, he manages to keep both upright, battered, but still afloat. Ultimately, this is the story of a man’s coming to terms with the relative insignificance of one particular little life. I was pleasantly surprised that my eyes never glazed over by all the technical details. Rather, Casey gives just enough to bring the world of New England fishing to life and to put the reader beside the protagonist. I was totally caught up in the narrative, even if the casual adultery made me very uncomfortable.

[Martha · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

At times this was a 4 star read…. but i think thats just because i grew up in Rhode Island and on the east bay side of Narragansett bay. The places were familiar to me. I know boat builders and fishermen and this book portrayed these men pretty accurately. I settled on 3 stars because the story was really just ok, in my opinion. I probably wouldn’t recommend this book to many people and it will stick with me just because the setting was familiar.

[Alex · Rating 1 out of 5]

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 novel, which stays on the soap opera level when it's not trying to mythologize a man who makes self-indulgent mistake after mistake, is on the same list of winners as Invisible Man by Ellison, JR by Gaddis, The Adventures of Augie March by Bellow, or Gravity's Rainbow by Pynchon (not forgetting Roth or Updike or Faulkner) is simply mind-boggling. It read like a gawky underclassman's attempt at a novel, despite being about a man's mid-life crisis, complete with banal prose, stereotypical characters, and endless cliches all around. A stunning and eye-opening clear-cut low point for the National Book Award, as this one celebrates the mediocre and formulaic over the skilled and/or daring. It is the only NBA winner I refuse to shelve with the other NBA winners--it remains in a dusty, dark closet away from bright lights. Of course, over 50+ years of any award there will be some serious duds given the offerings any year presents. However, this is the worst NBA winner to date by far--there's really no close second in ignominy here. The Foundation would have done better to suspend the award for 1989 and not given it out at all.

[Julia Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was kind of my white whale. Started it, abandoned it, started it over, put it aside, did a big push the past few days. Learned a lot about boats and fishing terms. Loved the Rhode Island setting. Loved the class stuff. Loved pushing myself to read out of comfort zone. But it was stiff in a Harvard-educated male author kind of way, you know, the kind who writes books about unhappy men making bad choices.

[Abby · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first year we lived in Charlottesville, John Casey came to a large party we hosted with our neighbors. The cheap beer abounded, glow-in-the-dark bracelets were distributed liberally, and the music was loud but not louder than the outrageous din of our partygoers, mostly MFA students. Little fireworks were set off in the street; the cops came; I wanted everyone to go home but they didn’t. But. All this to say, whenever someone references John Casey, this is the image that rises to my mind: thin, white-haired John Casey, in a loose-fitting shirt, sitting cross-legged on our cracked front sidewalk, alone, wearing a glow-in-the-dark bracelet as a collar, looking at his hands. Sad, strange, funny John Casey. It’s about time I read something he wrote, I thought, and so I finally picked up Spartina, which received the National Book Award in 1989.

I’ve never really liked books like this—masculine-centric novels laden with industry jargon, and they are somehow even less interesting if they’re about men on boats, men who worship the sea, men who speak in limitless streams of fishing rodomontade. And I didn’t really like this novel. Casey’s prose is light and simple. Sometimes it sings. But the story held no pull for me. I can’t fathom why anyone would be much interested in Dick Pierce, but maybe that’s the point. I’d much rather have read a novel from the perspective of his quiet, long-suffering wife, May.

[Kevin Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

A underread classic. Absolutely loved and can see why it won the National Book Award.

[Chris Gager · Rating 3 out of 5]

I discovered this on my bookshelves and will read it in the very near future. There are a few books ahead of it right now, so ...

So, NOW I'm reading this. The author keeps things rolling along nicely, and our protagonist has already been to Westerly, home of my youngest sister. So, that's nice. One possible problem(for me) is the blue -collar "hero." I'm not partial to eco-criminality, no matter how small.

So ... things are sort of rambling on in this particular neck of the woods - Rhode Island ... west of Pt. Judith. Despite having lived in New England for most of my 73 years, I've spent only a little time in Rhode Island, a state with a lot of water and a lot(for its size) of very nice beaches. So far this story is set among sand and salt water. Thematically it seems a bit like Russell Banks(Affliction, Continental Drift) light. Blue collar, married guy in the the great middle of his life faces challenges, including the temptation of "another woman." My own family spent some time on Martha's Vineyard back in the mid-fifties, and lived in Edgartown for a year in the mid-sixties. Back then it seemed like a paradise to me. About 50 or so miles due east from where this story is set. The theme of using up natural beauty to make money(i.e. development) has reared it's oh-so-ugly head in the plot.

About halfway through with this salty tale about an aging salt. Dick isn't the most sympathetic character(he's kind of a grouch), but he does grow on one and the book is very well written. You can almost taste that salt air. Also, this is very much a guy's book, focusing a lot one particular and dangerous (mostly)male activity - fishing. There's a bit of drug-running excitement as well. Again ... all of it very well described.

- the cover illustration is neat, but inaccurate.

- Dick is Sully's(Nobody's Fool) blood brother.

- Dick's reminiscence @ the wedding cake house is very nicely written.

- The "hurricane of 1954" was Carol. I was there(in Menemsha) Charlie - 7 years old - a day to remember for sure.

So ... now the story is getting bogged down in romantic shenanigans as the author spends far too much time on two people becoming unlikeable for indulging their "needs." Betrayal of trust and relationship "trespassing" may be al too human, but my patience wears thin. The author gets almost literally bogged down in a ridiculous, over-described "love" scene smeared in mud in a nighttime salt marsh. Lets get back to the fishing, please.

Just read the author's wiki page ... he's been a BAD BOY! Sexual harrasser as a college prof. Quite a few accusers ... that provides some "enlightenment" vis-a-vis his intesest in sex and women.

- Uh-oh, one of those deadly "you see"s crops up.

- The author makes Dick's wife almost invisible. BTW the protagonist's name is Dick Pierce ... get it???

Finished last night after a bit of skimming through a lot Wally Lamb-ish life and love babble. When the big hurricane story(very well done) reached its end and it was more or less back to the ordinary world I could see that there were plenty of pages to go and began to have a sinking feeling. That feeling was confirmed by the unfolding and seemingly endless, convoluted blah-blah-blah word soup about Dick and life and May and Dick and May and Elsie and Dick and Elsie and yet more about life. I suppose if it had been more "read-able" I might have been ok with it, but it was LESS readable and so I lowered my overall rating to 3.25*, rounding down to 3*. National Book Award winner? BOOOO!

- In the "oh, REALLY" department ... Does Dick not wonder what his teen-aged son Charlie will think about him(his father) staying the night with Elsie(not his mother) even though no sex occurred?

- the description "Keith college-boy" is repeated WAY too many times. Unkind and dismissive. Let's face it, Dick's a resentful jerk. Good boat-builder, though.

- another "you see" and a "whipping/whipped" line too..

- Poignant, heartfelt rumination or bullshit bunko-shovelism. YBTJ: "She changed some too. Still quick and tart, but sweeter. Easier and sweeter and more connected ..." ummmm - "connected" to what? how connected?

[Daniel Villines · Rating 2 out of 5]

Spartina offers a glimpse into a rural New England town where everybody knows everybody and secrets are the only temporary privacy afforded its residents. The town's economy is fishing, crabbing, and lobster hunting but the community also sits at an epoch. The yuppies are moving in to take advantage of nature, ocean breezes, and affordable serenity just hours away from the chaos of civilization. While the premise is interesting, the story itself often becomes bogged down in its own narrative. I found myself wanting to reach the ends of chapters, which is not a good sign of an enjoyable book.

As for the characters, I liked the depictions of human nature: how each of the characters presented a strong conviction of their sense of being and how easily that conviction crumbled in the face of tangible temptation. However, they fell short of being convincing.

The characters did not come across as unique individuals. Rather, they all seemed to have been made from a single flavor of ice cream that was simply served in different containers: cone, cup, or bowl. Their personalities tended to overlap and blend together. Their actions may have been interesting but their reactions lacked the emotional responses that could be considered theirs as individuals.

The best parts of this book were the depictions of the sea and life on a small boat. Had there been more sea action, this book could have overcome some of its shortcomings. I found myself wishing for the next voyage chapter after chapter.

[Ken · Rating 3 out of 5]

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. Some readers will enjoy Casey's poetic bent, but as I said, it just wasn't for me.

[Old Man JP · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book, not a great one. It follows a luckless fisherman with a bit of a temper who has been building his own boat and is trying to scrape up enough money to finish it. When he finally finishes the boat he takes it out alone in an attempt to avoid a hurricane that is heading toward New England. This is probably the best part of the book describing his battle with the hurricane. Much of the book is taken up with an affair he is having with a younger woman.

[Pete Camp · Rating 1 out of 5]

Poor

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good read about Dick Pierce, a fisherman in his 40s, married with two teenage sons. He is building a boat, has financial difficulties which lead him to doing things out of his comfort zone. Dick is a proud, prickly, grouchy man. He has the bad habit of saying things that can and do offend people. I enjoyed the fishing business descriptions and learnt about the lobster, crab and swordfish businesses. There a number of events that keep the novel continually interesting. Smuggling, fishing expeditions, an affair and a hurricane. A worthwhile read.

[Annika · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ugh. I did not like this book. I read it to fulfill the requirement of a book published the year I was born, and it had won awards, so it seemed promising. No. At first I was won over by the inside look into the life of a New England fisherman, but an unsympathetic main character, and a plot that seemed built purely on creating drama, not on logic, made this a somewhat painful read. Spoilers ahead because I need to rant a bit. Even though I could guess that an affair was coming, but it didn’t seem to make sense once it actually happened, nor is it that likely that the chick would get pregnant after such few instances, and, really, what are the chances that a life-long fisherman would launch his new boat, the thing he’s been working on for the whole book, and not stop to check the weather first and notice that a GIANT HURRICANE was coming that day to the exact spot where he lives?! That defies disbelief. And I don’t care if the girl tells you she can do well on her own, if you get a girl pregnant, you automatically offer to help pay for the support of the child, and you don’t come to that conclusion as an afterthought. Lastly, tying up a crummy book with some “deep” thoughts about everyone being just small things floating in the waves of the universe is a stupid cop-out. Rant over.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 propulsion. The landscape and history of Rhode Island are presented so vividly, it is hard to believe that Casey himself has not lived in the area and made his living as a commercial fisherman/lobsterman. I look forward to reading Compass Rose, the recently published sequel.

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 needed jolt of passion. The 2nd half of the book is better than the first but that may be because you come to know the characters better. There is an accumulative power to the story.

[Donovan Wisdom · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book took off really slowly but man did it not go anywhere at all. Terrible people doing terrible, but still boring, things.
I was on a National Book Award kick so I read it. I immediately lost interest in my National Book Award kick.
If you want to do an award winner reading list, go with Pulitzer. I can't remember a NBA winner that I liked, with the exception of "The Shipping News" which, oh yeah, also won the Pulitzer.

[Susie · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Debbie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read a rave review, and the cover talked about its book award, but honestly, I could not get into it and did not care one way or the other about the main character. He may turn out to be a flawed hero, but for the first 75 pages, all I saw were flaws, and frankly I didn't care enough to find out what new adversity he had to face (evidently, a hurricane).

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book took my breath away when I read it. I live in Rhode Island, and the author completely captured the spirit of the people who live along the coast line. I remember staying up late into the evening to read this book, and then telling everyone I knew that they had to read it. It is a well-drawn, character-driven novel.

[Myr]

I know, I know. I'm hopeless! But it's another book Sean gave me that I just didn't like and couldn't bring myself to finish. It won the 1989 National Book Award, so I guess the characters enthralled some people out there. Sadly, I am not one of them.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

More white, middle-aged philandering without real consequence for the protagonist. Casey's writing is better than the sum of the plot.

[Lisa Gray · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn't finish it. Not so interested in a self-absorbed middle aged boat builder who isn't very nice to his kids and wife and going through a midlife crisis....

[Maggie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the nautical jargon, but the plot was lame. The females characters were created with no respect for, or understanding of women. So bogus!