Beth's November Pick

That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo

Summary

For Griffin, all paths, all memories, converge at Cape Cod. The Cape is where he took his childhood summer vacations, where he and his wife, Joy, honeymooned, where they decided he’d leave his LA screenwriting job to become a college professor, and where they celebrated the marriage of their daughter Laura’s best friend. But when their beloved Laura’s wedding takes place a year later, Griffin is caught between chauffeuring his mother’s and father’s ashes in two urns and contending with Joy and her large, unruly family. Both he and she have also brought dates along. How in the world could this have happened? By turns hilarious, rueful, and uplifting, That Old Cape Magic is a profoundly involving novel about marriage, family, and all the other ties that bind.

About the Author
Richard Russo lives in coastal Maine with his wife and their two daughters. He was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for Empire Falls. His novels Empire Falls, Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody's Fool and Straight Man as well as his short story collection, The Whore's Child, are available in Vintage paperback.

Interview with Richard Russo: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/10/09/midmorning2/

From Bookmarks Magazine

Set in Cape Cod, California, and Maine rather than upstate New York, That Old Cape Magic is smaller in scope than Russo's previous novels but nonetheless contains Russo's trademark psychological complexity. While reviewers disagreed about the novel's overall success, they concurred that Griffin's quarrelsome, bitter parents—whom Griffin can't seem to shed—steal the show. Another favorite was the story within a story called "The Summer of the Brownings," about Griffin's childhood friendship during a Cape Cod holiday. But critics were generally split on the comic, slapstick set pieces, Griffin's narrative voice, and the story line's predictability. Still, Russo fans will find much to enjoy here.

From Publishers Weekly

Crafting a dense, flashback-filled narrative that stutters across two summer outings to New England (and as many weddings), Russo (Empire Falls) convincingly depicts a life coming apart at the seams, but the effort falls short of the literary magic that earned him a Pulitzer. A professor in his 50s who aches to go back to screenwriting, Jack Griffin struggles to divest himself of his parents. Lugging around, first, his father's, then both his parents' urns in the trunk of his convertible, he hopes to find an appropriate spot to scatter their ashes while juggling family commitments—his daughter's wedding, a separation from his wife. Indeed, his parents—especially his mother, who calls her son incessantly before he starts hearing her from beyond the grave—occupy the narrative like capricious ghosts, and Griffin inherits the worst attributes of both. Though Russo can write gorgeous sentences and some situations are amazingly rendered—Griffin wading into the surf to try to scatter his father's ashes, his wheelchair-bound father-in-law plummeting off a ramp and into a yew—the navel-gazing interior monologues that constitute much of the novel lack the punch of Russo's earlier work.

From The Washington Post

Richard Russo has written a novel for people who are terrified of becoming their parents, which is to say for everybody. The misanthropic hero of "That Old Cape Magic" jitters with the anxiety of influence repelled and attracted to his mom and dad like Woody Allen playing Hamlet. After those sprawling epics of American life "Empire Falls" and "Bridge of Sighs," Russo's new book seems especially intimate, a dyspeptic romantic comedy from a Pulitzer Prize winner who catches the bittersweet humor of our common neuroses. The book's two-part structure is simple and elegant: two weddings, a year apart, the first on Cape Cod, the second in Maine. Russo's focus in both parts is on Jack Griffin, a 57-year-old English professor who's having a "middle-age meltdown." Even while the wedding march plays for members of the younger generation, he's busy fumbling his own 34-year marriage. Griffin loves his wife, but "his dissatisfaction had become palpable." He's bored with teaching, and he hankers after the excitement of his Hollywood writing days. His bigger problem, though, is that he still harbors enough "pathological resentment" toward his parents for a therapists' convention. He's been carting his father's ashes around in the trunk of his car for nine months, waiting for just the right moment to let go of the mortal remains of the man who drove him crazy. And meanwhile, his 85-year-old mother keeps heckling him from her nursing home. It's a sign of Russo's comic genius that these two hilariously acerbic parents -- one on the phone, the other in an urn -- just about steal the show. In their prime, they were frustrated academics who toiled away at second-rate Midwestern colleges, cheated on each other and treated everyone, including their only son, with disdain. Some of the novel's best set pieces describe their disastrous affairs and the shared bitterness that somehow kept them coming back to each other. "They were a single entity," Griffin remarks, "with the same contemptuous mind." American white guys may have no better ally in the world of fiction than Richard Russo. His popular, critically acclaimed novels manage to expose the fragile egos and embarrassing foibles of men while still making them seem essentially lovable. Poor Griffin doesn't want to be a jerk; he just can't help it sometimes -- when the perfect gibe bounces on his tongue like a coin he's got to spend. Although this is a much smaller canvas than Russo has worked on in recent years, what "That Old Cape Magic" lacks in breadth and plot momentum it makes up for with psychological nuance about the ties that bind -- and snap. It's a marvelous portrayal of the strands of affection and irritation that run through a family, entangling in-laws and children's crushes and even old friends. Griffin has concentrated for so long on separating himself from both his wife's parents and his own that he can't see just how thoroughly he's picked up their pet phrases, their pretentious attitudes, even their congenital unhappiness. "You could put a couple thousand miles between yourself and your parents," Griffin says, "and make clear to them that in doing so you mean to reject their values, but how did you distance yourself from your own inheritance?" Like Colson Whitehead's "Sag Harbor" earlier this year, Russo's novel focuses largely on a favorite vacation spot, a place that became hallowed through repeated visits with family. The two novels offer black-and-white versions of a young boy's back-seat excitement as the car passes over the bridge into a special world of freedom. But how reliable are the youthful memories we carry around with us? What monuments of resentment have we built on the shaky foundation of misunderstandings and misimpressions? For Griffin's parents, Cape Cod offered paradise "one glorious month, each summer," but he has the troubling sense that "the perfect spot they were searching for" didn't really exist. And now he's sensing the same restlessness may have infected him, too, leaving him pining for that magical place that will satisfy all his desires. Unfortunately, he realizes, returning to one's youth and escaping one's parents are mutually exclusive fantasies. The shelf of books about middle-aged guys going through midlife crises is long, of course, but Russo threads more comedy through this introspective genre than we get from John Updike, Richard Ford or Chang-rae Lee. He's a master of the comic quip and the ridiculous situation. And as he's shown before, particularly in "Straight Man," one of the funniest college novels ever written, he can be a clown when he wants to. The climactic scene of "That Old Cape Magic" is a no-holds-barred bit of Steve Martin-like wedding slapstick, complete with pratfalls, sucker punches and runaway wheelchairs. "Late middle age," Griffin notes, "was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming." That's a pretty accurate description of this utterly charming novel. If you always cry at weddings, you'll cry at this -- and laugh, too.

Other Reviews

“Marvelous. . . . Utterly charming.” —The Washington Post

“In one of America’s most mythic landscapes, Russo details one man’s shaky first steps out of his past and into self-knowledge with good humor, generosity, and an open heart.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“His most intimate yet: an astute portrait of a 30-year marriage, in all its promise and pain. . . . His honest, heartfelt storytelling—like a cooling breeze off a certain New England shoreline—has never felt fresher.” —People

“A fine book about parents and children, about remembering and forgetting, and ultimately what it means to be a grown-up.” —The San Francisco Chronicle

“When we finish reading That Old Cape Magic, we know we’ll start rereading it soon. And that the characters will come to mind at the most unpredictable times. We will stay on speaking terms with them more than we do with some of our real-life cousins.” —The Miami Herald

“Suffused with Russo’s signature comic sensibility, and with insights, by turns tender and tough, about human frailty, forbearance, fortitude, and fervor.” —The Boston Globe

“Russo has a great sense of humor, of the absurd, and of the intricate, constantly shifting, complex emotional levels of his characters. . . . The way Russo plumbs their depths are wonderful. Incidents and episodes charm and sparkle.” —The Providence Journal

“Does not disappoint. . . . [With] deep connection to place, and affection for the large cast of characters who blunder and struggle through his pages.” —The New York Times Book Review

“[With] elegant writing. . . . Few novelists exude as much wry compassion as Russo.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“The Pulitzer Prize-winning author has again worked his magic.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“Glistening. . . . [A] chambered nautilus of a novel.” —Maureen Corrigan, “Fresh Air,” National Public Radio

“Good-humored, deeply felt, frankly put. . . . Full of Mr. Russo’s canny dialogue and piquantly funny observations.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Tender and heartening. . . . Full of humor and pathos. . . . A deeply mature novel that deals with marriage and aging so gracefully.” —San Antonio Express-News

“A comic yet thoughtful take on marriage. . . . But amid the humor, it raises questions about the complications we inherit and the ones we build for ourselves.” —USA Today

“A touching portrait of smart people spinning their wheels.” —Chicago Tribune

From AudioFile

Russo's middle-aged protagonist, Griffin, confronts his parents' failed marriage, his own troubled marriage, and his unattained ambitions. He never again achieves the joy inherent in his early childhood recollections of summers on Cape Cod. Recounting his parents' academic lives, fraught with intellectual snobbery and combative bickering, Griffin, a screenwriter turned English professor, never ceases to be baffled by their pretentious superiority. Arthur Morey grasps Russo's moments of cynical despair as well as the story's hilarity. His calculated narration develops distinct characters through artful and well-defined emotional pathos. His approach deftly captures Russo's depiction of life's ironies and comedy.