Room for Improvement

August 8, 2011
National Book Award–winner Casey (Spartina) offers insight into his lifelong avocation. Casey notes that the “parts of history most easily accessible to us are, naturally, those more fully recorded,” and he spent most of his adult life recording his own. Offered in a series of vignettes, some previously published, Casey focuses on endurance activities, such as long-distance running, cross-country skiing, and rowing and canoeing. Those are occasionally interrupted by chest-thumping events such as judo and hay baling. Casey, a literature professor, regularly invokes such authors as Henry James, Henry David Thoreau, and William Faulkner. His own narrative skills are featured in his tale of an Outward Bound adventure in Maine. Spent largely with a group in a whaling boat that became a “communal cradle... conveniently on course,” it was a physical and mental journey akin to a combination of Walden and Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat.”

September 1, 2011

An author/lit professor/exercise fanatic chronicles his lifelong pursuit of endurance sports and survival training.

Marathons, cross-country skiing races, endurance hikes, epic rowing junkets, wilderness survival trips—National Book Award winner Casey (English/Univ. of Virginia; Compass Rose, 2010, etc.) has led a vigorous life worth writing about, and he does so in a muscular prose worthy of his manly pursuits. That's not to say, however, that the narrative is driven by a testosterone-fueled need to prove athletic excellence or dominion over nature. Instead the author attempts to re-create on paper the mind-numbing cold of a snowy night spent huddled in a self-made shelter, the strange weightlessness of a long-distance run and the hand-shredding and leg-shaking fatigue brought on by hours of rowing. For all of the vivid descriptions, however, there is an analytical distance, the requisite probe for meaning engendered by the mind of a writer and teacher—not so much in the acknowledgement of the therapeutic power of exercise as a balm against divorce-induced depression, but rather in the effort to contextualize the intensely personal yet still communal Outward Bound experience, or to describe the kinship and camaraderie of like-minded individuals engaged in the same quest for something beyond health, vanity, endorphins or competition. Age becomes a more prominent theme as the essays progress, with the author concocting increasingly elaborate exercise routines to commemorate his birthdays. Casey shows evident pride as he details his continued achievements, but the same outward self-assessment that pervades the collection remains, a balance between acknowledging the passing of years while striving to avoid being controlled by them.

Occasionally self-indulgent, but the collection's rustic charm and indomitable spirit transcend its flaws.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

November 15, 2011
Winner of the 1989 National Book Award for his novel Spartina, Casey here presents 24 thoughtful essays on the wide-ranging physical challenges he has posed for himself over his five decades of adulthood: hiking, cross-country skiing, judo, marathon running, camping, rock climbing, rowing, and more. There's a Sports Illustrated piece from the late 1960s on the reactions he elicited from surprised people he passed while jogging in the preJim Fixx days ( Here he comes to save us in his Keds, one boy sneered). And an expansive, fully realized piece on his 26-day Outward Bound adventure along the Maine coast ( We . . . remember not just what we saw or what we did but how alive we felt ). In these challenges, many of them solitary, Casey explores the visceral push-pull of muscle and bone and sinew and the mental states that drive or limit them. And if Casey here and there reaches that heightened state of feeling alive, so might his readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)