John Casey's Compass Rose

By BRETT WARNKE
           
                 “Here we are.  We live in South County,” is the concluding statement of community in John Casey’s Compass Rose, the sequel to his 1989 National Book Award-winning novel Spartina.
Spartina told the story of Dick Pierce, a little fish, in our tiny state of Rhode Island.  This is not to say there are not big fish around.  The novel is brimming with descriptions of the invisible class order.  Dick’s father “probably held the record at South County Hospital for biggest bill ever paid by an uninsured patient.”  Dick, too, has empty pockets. Despite having a wife, May, and two sons he is too proud and flinty to swim quietly behind the bigger fishes in town.
          Dick was a man who swore he’d never do two things:  “Be a caretaker for a summer house or mess up his family.”  He spends most of Spartina (which is freshwater swamp grass) picking through mud for quahogs and saving up money.  Why?  Because Spartina is also the name of a boat he secretly works on.   Dick is a father and a husband.  But it is his affair with Elise, an educated and passionate local D.E.M. officer, which gives the book its memorable affair and muddy love scenes.
           Compass Rose takes place after Elise “gave back” Dick to May.  In Spartina it was Elsie who was linked to every piece of Dick’s life—his personal past, his financial troubles, his relationships with a local benefactor named Miss Perry, and even his own family.  The product of their love affair, Rose, is the compass character for Casey’s sequel.
           Fitting for the novel’s release, Compass Rose begins in the “hard November fall” when the “first bite of cold, the trees bare, the spartina in the salt marsh blown into a tangled cover for the part of life that was meant to winter over.” May has decided to see Dick’s lovechild and speak with Elise.
         “You could keep Rose to yourself,” May says to her husband’s lover.  “Or Dick could come over here.  Least that way Rose would know her father.  But then Dick might end up thinking he’s got two families.  If Rose comes over to see us, then she’s the one with two families.”
          What then occurs is less a plot-driven novel than an exploration of South County life.  People care for one another in a time of rearranged or estranged families.  Rhode Island’s idiosyncrasies of language and culture are deployed with care and understanding:  “This place wasn’t like Newport or Watch Hill.  Here in South County it was farming and fishing,” Casey writes.  There are ma-hvelous w.a.s.p.s, devout Portugese, accent-conscious Swamp Yankees, and some Fitzgeralds, Salviattis, and a Bienvenue to nearly complete southern Rhode Island’s ethnic rainbow.   (Route 1 and Robert Beverly Hale Library also have cameos.)
            But Compass is mostly a novel about characters, especially women, enduring the changing conditions and strain of a world that is changing.  Fisheries are in trouble, the children’s accents are different, and the once solid traditions are melting into air.  May is less a leering and dutiful housewife in this novel.  She watches Dick and Elsie stifle their love, but she also arises from the pages in a way she didn’t in Spartina.  She confronts her husband, “You think everybody’s life stops when you go to sea?  Mine doesn’t.  I don’t disappear.  Elsie doesn’t disappear.  Your daughter doesn’t disappear.”
              If there is a foil to Dick’s straightforward working-class gruffness it’s Jack, a powerful right-winger with a gilded rolodex.  Jack has a real estate agenda and a tireless will.  One character calls him “the octopus.”  Jack has access to files, knows the laws, has politicians on call, and is disinclined to accept failure.  It is telling that this personification of implosive greed and a sleepless market is incapacitated by the book’s end.
              If this steady and worthwhile novel has a flaw, it is the emphasis on characters over occurrence.  Some chapters seem to tack and jib searching for a destination.  In others, Casey tosses personal details about characters like literary confetti.  Are they important?  Even with little context, this passage is not atypical:
              ’Eddie is the salt of the earth.  I loved my cousin Lydia, but I’m afraid one of her few faults was that she was unfair to Eddie.’  It took May a second to realize he was talking about Miss Perry.  Another second to realize he’d heard what she said about Eddie but that he didn’t understand it.  He swept on.  “Of course, to her credit Lydia held Dick in high regard, and Charlie and Tom were great favorites of hers, too.  She was a model of how fortunate people help out…
              In what context could a pronoun snarl of this magnitude be acceptable?
              But, here we are.  We do live in South County after all.  And Spartina and Compass Rose are some of the only nationally known novels about our watery corner of the country.  Take a look at Casey’s reflection of us, even if only to see whether Casey writes us rightly.