21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A sharp, wily, extended family story. This is not chick-lit, September 13, 2010
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
In rugged South County, off the coast of Rhode Island, the rustic beauty of the salt marshes, creeks, rivers, and ocean provides the substance and domain of Casey's follow-up/sequel to his 1989 National Book Award winner,
Spartina. This book begins roughly where the other left off, circa 1989, and then segues to fourteen years later midway through the novel. It is the story of love and family, and the vicissitudes of six or less degrees of separation.
Middle-aged Dick had an affair with nubile Elsie (in
Spartina), which resulted in baby Rose. Dick, the boat-builder and sea-lover, lives primarily out on the ocean. When he is landlocked, Dick stays in the house with his wife, May, and their two sons, Charlie and Tom. Dick and May have not quite resolved the pink elephant in the boat's deck. May wants Rose to be part of their lives, and she hasn't fully forgiven Dick. She is tormented about seeing Rose, and about not seeing Rose. How to accommodate the X-factor, Elsie? And the why oh Y-factor, Dick.
"May wondered how long she'd have to go on pulling thoughts out of her head. It seemed as endless as pulling rocks out of a field."
Elsie is free-spirited and nature loving. A Natural Resources officer, she is euphemistically called "the warden of the Great Swamp." Despite her affair with Dick, she is a sympathetic, strong, and enchanting character. She is feisty and warm, as seen through her nurturing devotion to the island's aging doyenne, Miss Perry. And she still loves Dick.
"She [Elsie] looked at Dick's face. She'd wanted him for the certainty of his fierce instincts; she'd put herself in the way of them. Now he was uncertain. Perhaps he was undone by seeing his daughter--perhaps he was undone by the trouble he was in."
This tight-knit, incestuous Irish community, where almost everyone is related by blood or marriage, is a roaring and clattering collection of individuals that form an uneasy alliance of entanglements and estrangements. As Rose grows up, she bickers hotly with her mother; while Elsie is the butterfly, Rose is the butterfly out of the chrysalis.
But Rose is also the compass, or the "compass rose." Casey uses this nautical term as a superb extended metaphor, whereby there are two rings--the outside ring denoting cardinal directions and the inner ring referring to magnetic cardinal directions. Rose's positioning in the two families exemplifies the symbolic and directional purview of their bonds--to each other, to the island, and to the trajectory of their hearts.
I had to start this book twice. The stylized beginning has staccato sentences and bulleted names, initially confusing me and turning me off. However, it is short-lived, and Casey's prose soon opens into a poetic and lyrical rhythm. The cadence is occasionally offbeat, but is uniquely exhilarating and provides a salty mood and atmosphere. The story is spicy, unpredictable and mouth-wateringly messy. The wily characters sizzle--from the dedication of Rose's protectors, such as Mary Scanlon, the town's chef and songbird, to Jack Aldrich, the town's land-grabbing, acquisitive swine.
"...it was part of the same thing over and over, the sun heating the surface of the ocean, vapor rising into clouds and fog, blowing over the land, turning back into water and running back into the sea, carrying bits of earth, the earth made of cracked and crumbled rock and the dead matter of everything else once so busily alive."
I felt like one of the residents of South County. John Casey is an assured storyteller whose spiky, nervy characters fly off the pages with pluck and spunk and longing. I highly recommend this for readers who love resonant, character-driven stories. This is not chick-lit.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
20 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
maybe it's just me, but this book fell short, October 25, 2010
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
When I saw "Compass Rose" pop up as a book I could review through Vine, I was interested. When I saw that it was a sequel, I decided that I should first read "Spartina." Which I did, and I loved it. I was immediately sucked into Dick's world - his quest to build his boat and make a living doing something he loved. I understood his desire to stay on his family's land and his bitterness towards all the rich people who were buying up the land for vacation homes and squeezing him - and people like him, working class people - out. The point of view of the novel was singular, not only from one man but from one particular point in time. While I certainly don't agree with all of Dick's choices or attitudes, he was compelling, and I read through "Spartina" quickly and often breathlessly.
So I was looking forward to "Compass Rose." And then I started reading it. Maybe I should say I started *forcing* myself to read it, because it was an effort.
Gone is that singular, compelling point of view. Instead, the point of view shifts every chapter from one *female* character to another. By the halfway point, we get to see things the points of view of Elsie, May, Miss Perry, and Mary. I specify from the halfway point because that's how far I am, and I don't think I'm going any further.
I emphasized female in the above paragraph for a reason. A man can certainly write female characters and a woman can certainly write male characters. I am not questioning that at all. But this book seems to be over-reaching, what with having so many female points of view: each woman comes from a different social class and has different life experiences. It just didn't work for me. I didn't believe it.
On top of that, I had a problem with the portrayal of Elsie in "Compass Rose." In "Spartina," she certainly likes Dick, but "Compass Rose" proclaims that Dick is "the love of her life." I guess I missed that part. In "Spartina" I saw Elsie as a strong woman who knows what she wants and goes for it: a baby, and she got that. When the affair ended, she didn't try to hold onto Dick. She knew what their relationship was and she was okay with it being that way and then being over. I remember at the end of "Spartina" - the last scene in fact - when Dick goes over to see her and tries to get something sexual started with her, but Elsie stops him because she doesn't want to do anymore damage to his marriage. Elsie is certainly not morally superior (she did have an affair with a married man and get pregnant by him) but she does seem to have a moral code of sorts that keeps her from crossing that line again. This is in sharp contrast to the Elsie we meet in "Compass Rose" who is now the one making sexual advances on Dick and he must stop her. She does an awful lot of moping around in the first half of "Compass Rose" too. She just was not the Elsie I had gotten to know in "Spartina."
But really, the thing that disappoints me the most about "Compass Rose" is that the books sprawls and meanders, and I find that I really don't care, and I hardly recognize the characters anyway. "Spartina" was so sharp whereas "Compass Rose" is, um... not. As much as I wanted to, I haven't been able to get into this book, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. "Spartina," though, that's a good book. If you haven't read anything by John Casey, read that one.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Quietly beautiful, September 20, 2010
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
A group of families living on a promontory of the Rhode Island coast deals with a potential shared trauma by integrating it into their history and community lives. It's a problem to say much more than that about the plot of the novel because the trauma is revealed only bit by bit, and indeed one of the strengths of the narrative is the deft way in which the author brings the reader to the shared knowledge that the characters have of the recent events that precede the novel and drive its plot, not by telling us things, but by integrating our knowledge of events by means of having us learn the way the characters learn: by context, intuition, and integration of signs into our growing background awareness of the community. I really didn't realize it was possible for a novel to narrate a story in this way: that the reader almost becomes a character or watcher in the community because of acquiring knowledge about it in the same way the characters do. It's am amazing strategy.
If U.S. literature has anything to offer the world, I think it's terms of the novel's sense of place. There's a sense in which we think of Americans as detached from place, radically mobile individuals, but the emotional strength of this novel comes from the characters' sense of location, which is why the property dispute with which the novel ends turns out to be such a motor both for introspection and action in the novel itself. You really get a sense of the Rhode Island coast here, but without show: in the matter of fact way that the characters (like most Americans) live their lives.
The novel is a lot like the garden that one of its main characters grows. It's beautiful, it repays investment, and it bears a ripe harvest.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
