Testimony and Demeanor

  I remembered today the first time I talked back to my father. I was thirteen; he was still farming then—in his fifties. We were clearing rocks out of a field so he could mow it without losing half the teeth out of the sickle bar. My mother came down with lunch just as he picked up a big rock and swung it into the back of the truck.

  She said, “You’ll throw your back out worse than last year.”

  He was in a good mood. He said, “No; I always get some strong spells in the summer. Comes right out of here.” He toed the ground.

  I said, “I don’t see how. It’s only dirt.”

  My mother laughed. My father said, “Maybe so.” He kept me working past sunset—himself too—and the next day his back was out.

  I once regarded that kind of memory as an encumbrance, or a luxury. But my most recent process isn’t as simple as the one that got me to New York in the first place; it has more to do with luxuries and encumbrances. What amazes me is that there seems to be some system in all this accumulation: a year ago I couldn’t have been bothered, I couldn’t have refined anything out of the uneasiness, and I probably wouldn’t have understood any of what has come or gone or stayed.

  ALSO BY JOHN CASEY

  SPARTINA

  A classic tale of a man, a boat, and a storm, National Book Award–winning Spartina is the lyrical story of Dick Pierce, a commercial fisherman along the shores of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay. A kind, sensitive family man, he is also prone to irascible outbursts against the people he must work for now that he can no longer make his living from the sea. Pierce’s one great passion, a fifty-foot fishing boat called Spartina, lies unfinished in his yard. Determined to get the funds he needs to buy her engine, he takes a foolish, dangerous risk. But his real test comes when he must weather a storm at sea in order to keep his dream alive. Moving and poetic, Spartina is a masterly story of one man’s ongoing struggle to find his place in the world.

  Fiction/Literature/0-375-70268-7

  THE HALF-LIFE OF HAPPINESS

  On a spring afternoon in Virginia, progressive attorney Mike Reardon strolls downtown Charlottesville feeling terrific. He surveys the elements in his appealing life: filmmaker wife Joss, his clever and canny daughters, the bohemian characters that share his seven-acre haven on the Rivanna River. But his blissful certainty is to be short-lived. A friend’s suicide and Joss’s affair with a mercurial woman turn Mike’s world upside down. Then he discovers the erotic quicksilver of the political campaign and begins a farcical run for office that consumes all their lives. Superbly plotted, buoyed with humor and hope, The Half-life of Happiness embraces the accidents and choices that shape our lives and the lives of those we love.

  Fiction/Literature/0-375-70608-9

  VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES

  Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order: 1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).

  Translated from the Italian by John Casey:

  ENCHANTMENTS

  A novel

  BY

  LINDA FERRI

  “A novel full of happiness, but with the sharp premonition of great sorrow; a novel full of pain but somehow tasting like honey.” —Diario

  Available in hardcover from Knopf

  $18.95 (Canada: $26.95) • 1-4000-4069-8

  PLEASE VISIT www.aaknopf.com

  A selection of titles available from John Casey in Vintage paperback:

  The Half-life of Happiness • 0-375-70608-9

  Spartina • 0-375-70268-7

  You’re an Animal, Viskovitz by Alessandro Boffa; Translated by John Casey • 0-375-70483-3