The Lay of the Land

By DOMINIQUE BROWNING

Where are we? Answers drift across the woods and salt marshes in John Casey’s beautiful, elegiac new novel. One person after another takes a bearing, sets a course, loses the way, makes a correction.

Illustration by Ward Schumaker

COMPASS ROSE

By John Casey

356 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95

“Compass Rose” is the story of a handful of people who live in a small coastal community in Rhode Island’s South County. Yet this bit of a world is complete unto itself, with its own force fields, its own variations off true north, its own ways of tilting into alignment. Like the love affair that is the novel’s magnetic pole, “Compass Rose” gathers its quiet strength from a slow accretion of instants of intimacy “both ferocious and serene,” moments that bubble up, collapse and decompose in the natural order of things, on their way to becoming the history of a place.

It is useless and truly beside the point, in a book of such compacted sweep, to condense the plot. Events are not what drive this narrative; people are. As in all lives, important things happen, as do banal things. Money, power, nature, lust and greed exert an irresistible pull. Trouble rises up, disturbs and dislocates, and then everything settles down.

“Compass Rose” continues a story that Casey began in “Spartina” just over 20 years ago. The setting is “a tiny ecosystem,” complains the angry, adolescent Rose of the new novel’s title. Her mother, Elsie, is a single woman who secretly, willfully became pregnant during an affair with a struggling fisherman named Dick, a married father whom she wanted “for the certainty of his fierce instincts.” But when Dick first lays eyes on his infant daughter, whose paternity is at that point still a secret, he becomes unsettled, unsure of where he is. Quietly, deliberately, he backs off, recalibrates.

Elsie is a natural resources officer for the state, “the warden of the Great Swamp,” as her friends joke. Possessed of a primal sense of the rhythms of life and death, she has “the righteousness of being one of those who knew that order.” This affinity is something she shares with Dick; in fact, it is “the innermost justifying of her love.” They remain apart, yet they constantly pull toward each other. “You’re here. You’re part of here,” Dick tells her. “We’re part of here.”

Their affair began in “Spartina,” and although “Compass Rose” stands on its own, I recommend reading the two novels back to back. “Spartina” is Dick’s story, the tale of a man more comfortable at sea than on land, a man who builds a boat strong and nimble enough to ride out a lethal hurricane. In “Compass Rose,” it’s the landbound women who drive the story.

Elsie’s friend Mary, “busting into every life but her own,” is a gifted cook, comfortable in the heat and bustle of a kitchen. Mary moves in with Elsie to help raise her daughter, and she is the friend to whom Rose turns when her relationship with her mother becomes brutally fractious. Dick’s wife, May, is estranged by her husband’s affair, but even more so by his inability to understand or appreciate her. During dinner, he looks at her “from far away, the table’s length like a stretch of water between them.” May is a homemaker, the parent who principally raised their two sons. Struggling to forgive her husband, she feels desperately alone: “Dick had a whole stretch of sea to roam around in, . . . and she hadn’t gone very far from where she started, just stayed at home. Imagining her life becoming bigger made her dizzy. But at the same time she felt less at the mercy of unhappiness.” It is May who takes the biggest risk, opening her heart to Rose, welcoming her to her household.

All around them, the natural order of things in South County is being upended. Fisheries are collapsing; land has more value as real estate than pasture. The disruptions of class snobbery have snaked their way into a place where creeks and ponds bear the names of families now barely able to hold on to their patch of earth. It’s a world divided between people like Elsie, who raise their children “so they can go anywhere,” and those like Dick and May, who intend to stay for generations more.

• Dominique Browning, the author of the memoir “Slow Love,” writes a column for the Environmental Defense Fund and blogs at SlowLoveLife.com.