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Griffin has been tooling around for nearly a year with his father's ashes in the trunk, but his mother is still very much alive, and not shy about calling on his cell phone. She does so as he drives down to Cape Cod, where he and his wife, Joy, will celebrate the marriage of their daughter Laura's best friend. For Griffin this is akin to driving into the past, since he took his childhood summer vacations there, his parents' respite from the hated Midwest, and the Cape is where he and Joy honeymooned.
But by the end of this perfectly lovely weekend, the past has so thoroughly swamped the present that the future suddenly hangs in the balance. And when, a year later, a far more important wedding takes place, their beloved Laura's, Griffin's chauffeuring two urns of ashes as he contends once more with Joy and her large, unruly family, and both he and she have brought dates along. How in the world could this have happened?
From the Compact...
Middle-aged disappointment is a tough sell. It's a subject that can easily fall into bitterness, dreariness, unattractive self-pity. And like everything else, it's probably easier to deal with on summer vacation.
In That Old Cape Magic, Richard Russo takes on the novel of middle-aged reassessment, the marital breakup novel, the academic novel, and, what the hell, tosses in a bit of the Hollywood novel, as well. What's remarkable is that the thing holds up as well as it does. There are places where it could be funnier, places where Russo fails in the novelist's duty to go for the empathetic instead of the merely sharp surface observation. But he's a smooth and, when he's at his best, rueful writer. Reading That Old Cape Magic, you feel yourself sliding into the life changes Russo describes as easily as his protagonist, Jack Griffin.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
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Lenore Catalina
reviewed That Old Cape Magic on April 11, 2019 That Old Cape Magic
As usual in Russo's stories we have a middle-aged man struggling in the present and reflecting back on his upbringing, trying to figure out how he got this way. Not that's he's in a bad way. He's 57, married 34 years, a college English professor in Connecticut who occasionally takes time away from professing to write film scripts in Hollywood. (His parents, both college English professors, view script-writing as akin to prostitution.) With three English professors in the story I think we get enough of a taste of that world of oddities, petty politics and political correctness to just about call this an academic novel.
So, our main character is at a critical point in life. He's had a good marriage, but it's reached a point where he and his wife are separating and each taking a lover for a year. Can they ever patch it up and get back together - as they both seem to want to do?
The present-day action in the story centers around two weddings about a year apart, first the best friend of their daughter's wedding and then their own daughter's wedding. As a child, the daughter had always been terrified that her parents would get divorced. So they waited for her to finish not only high school but college - and she is still terrified!
The main character has also had a double whammy of the death of both of his parents within a year or so. In fact he drives around Cape Cod (where one of the weddings is) with his parents' ashes in urns in his trunk, unable to decide where to spread them and whether to spread them together or separate (the latter as his mother wished).
His parents set the tone and the title for the book. They loved summering in beach cabins on Cape Cod -- dreamed of it all year long. Their dream would have been to have held positions in Ivy League schools in New England instead of, as they love to say over and over again, second-rate colleges in "the Mid-fucking-West." They are both well-published enough to get job offers and to bounce around from school to school.
And it's not just HIS parents. To some extent the whole story is how both sets of parents of husband and wife influenced their marriage - with good and bad examples, faithfulness and unfaithfulness. Our main character's parents were notoriously unfaithful to each other but stuck together through his childhood. Although you do have to wonder about a 57-year-old-guy who's still trying to figure out "Did my parents love me?"
We have the usual Russo humor and good writing:
"Bartleby, who'd begun their marriage preferring not to argue and ended it preferring not to speak at all…"
His mother's view of her students: "By contrast, she knew her students well enough to dislike them as individuals, for their intellectual laziness, their slovenly dress, their conventional instincts, their religious upbringing. They mostly disliked her too…"
And his mother's nasty streak coming out to her son sitting at her dying bedside: "How … does having you sit there day after day make me any less alone?"
"Maybe money did talk, as people claimed, but all it said to them was goodbye."
"Only very stupid people are happy."
I'll give this one a five. It's my fifth Russo, and I thought it was not only good but appropriately trim - it did not have the repetitive bloat that some of his books seem to acquire. Having grown up near the area, I enjoyed the local color of "The Cape."
Cape Cod cottages:
Top photo from Almy.com
Painting of Corn Hill by Edward Hopper, 1930. A great "then and now" web site of Hopper's Cape Cod paintings is at
Third photo from media.masslive.com
Bottom photo from i2.wp.com/finiconcierge.com
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