Word: spartina
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...SPARTINA...
...plain on the opening page that some large issues are going to be entertained. He introduces his hero, Dick Pierce, in a skiff, floating among the creeks and inlets of coastal Rhode Island. In paragraph two, Pierce ponders the marsh grass around him and has an insight: "Only the spartinas thrived in the salt flood, shut themselves against the salt but drank the water. Smart grass. If he ever got his big boat built he might just call her Spartina, though he ought to call her after his wife...
These sentences foreshadow nearly everything to come in Spartina, although just how cleverly Casey tips his hand does not become clear until much later. Pierce's family once mattered in this region of Rhode Island, but not any longer. A succession of bad breaks has "squeezed him up Pierce Creek to an acre of scrub," where he lives in a ramshackle house with his wife May and two teenage sons and scrabbles a living as a fisherman. "He'd had a plan: by age 40 he would be master of a ship. Here he was at age 40-plus...
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