Ordinary Seaman

Newsday

One of the most exciting and ambitious novelists currently exploring the form....In its electric verbal intensity...as well as in its sheer story-telling power, The Ordinary Seaman is a remarkable novel.

Chicago Tribune

An imaginative tour de force, a spectacular achievement by any standards.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A voyage of the damned, albeit on a ship that never sails, is the framing concept of this powerful narrative. Fifteen desperate men lured from Central America by the promise of work aboard a freighter find themselves trapped on a rusting, rat- and roach-infested hulk without plumbing, heat or electricity, abandoned at an isolated Brooklyn pier. Placated by the promise that they will eventually be paid, the crew work for six months under horrifying conditions: half starved, filthy, sick and humiliated, they're victims of their own poverty and the chicanery of others. Goldman shapes his story through the tales-often ribald and laced with Spanish vernacular-the characters tell to make their ordeal bearable. He focuses on Esteban Gaitan, at 19 already a haunted shadow, tortured by flashbacks to his experiences as a Sandinista guerrilla and by the death in combat of his young lover. Initially, the rambling tales and discursions impede the narrative's forward movement, but gradually, the stories accumulate and resolve into a searing picture of human vulnerability and courage. When Esteban surreptitiously leaves the ship and prowls the ethnic neighborhoods of Brooklyn in search of food and succor, the story opens out and presents a fascinating picture of a corner of America as seen through unsophisticated eyes. While this is surely a saga of betrayal and exploitation, Goldman maintains a note of cautious optimism about the resourcefulness of men pushed to the brink of despair, and about the determined search for both love and new life in a difficult new land. Goldman won the Sue Kaufman Prize for first fiction for The Long Night of White Chickens. This novel, inspired by an actual incident, should establish him securely on the literary map. Author tour. Feb.

Library Journal

Goldman's first novel, The Long Night of the White Chickens LJ 6/1/92, won several literary prizes and was a surprise best seller. Here, a group of Nicaraguan men come to America.

Carolyn See

"I can't recommend this book highly enough... The Ordinary Seaman does credit to the novelistic form, yielding up mysterious, vivid worlds, seldom seen but always there. It's just great. I loved it." -- The Washington Post

Gail Caldwell

"An abundant, beautifully imagined novel...vibrant and true...A story of survival, but its epic reach and exquisite use of time give it the sheen and depth of several realities taking place at once... The Ordinary Seaman surges on the power of the imagination." -- The Boston Globe

Kirkus Reviews

Goldman's acclaimed debut, The Long Night of the White Chickens (1992), proves to have been no fluke: Its successor is an equally compelling saga of a crew of poor, would-be Central American sailors stranded aboard the rat-infested hulk of a dead ship.

Esteban, a 19-year-old survivor of a Sandinista battalion shot to pieces in a contra ambush, flies to New York as part of a group of hopeful, desperate strangers hoping to take seamens' berths on the cargo ship Urus. On arrival, the crew is shocked to see their vessel stripped and sagging along an abandoned Brooklyn pier, its engine room a blackened disaster from a fire at sea on its last voyage. Despite appearances, the yanqui Captain and his non- Spanish-speaking mate are insistent that the Urus will be rebuilt, and they quickly set the crew to work. Summer fades into chilly fall, however, and it becomes obvious to the seamen that not only will the ship never become seaworthy, but they will never be paid; with no cash and no legal status, they're trapped in a floating nightmare. Already ill-clothed and -fed, their despair proves as numbing as the autumn winds, until Esteban begins to explore the area's warehouses, bringing back whatever he can steal. His forays lead him to a Latino neighborhood, where he finds sympathy, a job, and even a girl. He helps the others as best he can, insisting that a friend suffering from a bad burn be taken to the hospital (and he is, never to be heard from again); and when the crew's plight finally attracts official notice, Esteban again takes matters into his own hands.

A bizarre set of circumstances (inspired by a true story) vividly wrought, but even more memorable is Goldman's fresh and moving take on such matters as longing, love, cruelty, and fellowship, probed in a poignant and original narrative.