That Old Cape Magic

This book was a delight, an easy read with lots of surprises. My entire family has grown up in the .....Mid-West, so as you can imagine, this book was very close to my heart and soul. My brother and sister-in-law live their lives from one vacation to the other. Will be watching for the next book and also looking for the previous books written by Richard Russo. This book gets a two thumbs up.

I would like to think of Russo as being one of my favorite authors but don't feel qualified to make that statement since this is only the third book I've read by him....Empire Falls and Bridge of Sighs being the other two. But I will say that I've loved all three and look forward to going back and reading some of his earlier works. So when writing this review, I'm not sure if his writing style has changed or if he has, in fact, gotten better. All I know is that I think he's a great storyteller and That Old Cape Magic keeps proving that point over and over with each page you turn. I've been so looking forward to August '09 because there were four books coming out that I've been eager to read....South of Broad by Pat Conroy, Rules of Vengeance by Christopher Reich, The White Queen by Philippa Gregory and That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo. I thought I'd start out with the Russo book and right off the bat I've hit a home run. I loved it!!!!! There are many authors out there who write stories with very little dialogue and, most times, they are not my favorite books simply because the author's storytelling capabilities aren't good enough to pull this off. In Russo's book, I didn't care if the characters said one word to each other because the story he was telling was just so interesting that I failed to notice the lack of discourse. And this is an author who definitely loves his bridges. As I've already mentioned, I've only read three of Russo's books but each one prominently mentions a bridge. In Empire Falls, it was the Iron Bridge that separated the mansion of the Whiting's from the rest of blue collar Empire Falls. The Bridge of Sighs is an actual bridge located in Venice and it's the last thing a prisoner walks over before being imprisoned in that famous city. Is Russo trying to tell us something? Do his characters cross over into their own prison of sorts as a penance when crossing these bridges? In this book, the bridge of note is the Sagamore Bridge. It represents two weeks of happiness to Jack Griffin's family as it leads to Cape Cod....their ultimate vacation place and their reprieve from the Mid f'n West as his parents liked to call it. Russo has so many subplots in this book, one of which is the story of a childhood summer on Cape Cod where young Jack meets young Peter Browning and has the most idyllic two weeks of his life as Peter's family is everything Jack wishes his was and Peter is the friend he always wanted. Four decades later, as a would-be novelist, it is this story (Summer of the Brownings) that Jack is destined to tell and it's something he's had in the works for years but he can never seem to finish it. It makes me wonder if this story (That Old Cape Magic) is also something that Russo has been dying to tell for years and perhaps he too has been sitting on it for a long time. This is only one of the stories Russo tells. He goes through Jack's life with his academically snobbish parents, Jack's marriage to so

Jack Griffin hates his mother. (She's elderly now, though. OK, he _resents_ her. But in a deep-seated way.) Even at 58 -- married but arguing a lot, torn between screenwriting and teaching, busy going to weddings and carving out vacation time, unsure even whether to live on the West Coast or the East -- Griffin is still trying to escape the influence of his discontented, adulterous, academic-snob parents. Richard Russo's seventh novel sidesteps his frequent theme of small-town decay and returns to the academic parody of *Straight Man* (1997) -- aiming the ridicule directly at Griffin's mother. For one thing, she can't be troubled to remember the names of people who haven't done graduate work. She lashes out even when Griffin is sitting dutifully by her hospital bed: "'How,' she asked, matter-of-factly, `does having you sit there day after day make me any less alone?'" But Russo is a master of tonal shifts, and *Magic* overcomes such ugliness with a wedding rehearsal scene in which Grandpa somehow ends up in a tree, still in his wheelchair, upside down. And there's the funny story about Dad allowing 7-year-old Griffin to drink some spiked eggnog, which is funny until it turns into the little boy wondering which of his boozy, irresponsible parents had pulled him out, or when. Or even if they cared about him at all. In trying to refashion our personalities and improve our lives, Russo seems to suggest, we're no better off than a feeble old man, stuck in a tree -- upside down in a motionless wheelchair -- cursing like mad and trying to get out. And yet. Near the end of his tale of two weddings, Griffin has conversations with people from different parts of his life -- all of whom had [expletives] for parents, and all of whom still manage to retain some love for the folks who raised and enraged them. The cynical voices of his snobbish, misfit parents, Griffin realizes, have been buzzing around in his brain for a long, long time. Finally, late in middle age, he learns to shut them off. When it come to his mother, he discovers, he didn't hate her at all. He loved her -- loves her. Well, parts of her. Is that so unusual or bad?

Jack Griffin, the protagonist of TOCM, is attending a wedding with Joy, his wife, when she discloses that, well, maybe, despite more than 30 years of marriage, Griffin's former business partner Tommy is her true love and soul mate. The disclosure comes at a difficult time for Griffin. His tart-tongued mother is in a nursing home and his father has recently died. And, the effect of this disclosure is a big-time midlife crisis, with Griffin creating upheaval in his nuclear and extended families. Through Griffin's midlife crisis, Russo primarily explores two overlapping issues: marriage and the effects that parents have on their children, long after the kids have become independent married adults. In exploring these issues, Russo crafts a very balanced novel. To cite the obvious example, the marriage of Griffin's snobbish professorial parents, who had a single child, is balanced by the marriage of Joys' parents, who had many kids and love rainy afternoon board games. But here, the point is that Russo creates many contrasting marital pairings in TOCM, all of them exploring aspects of marital dynamics or stages in marital life. Then, late in his book, Russo shows why he is such a good novelist, since he circles back and shows how his obvious marital contrasts hide the subtleties, which actually account for whether spouses are happy or unhappy. Marriage is a complex and bewildering game, he is saying. Russo's second issue is parents and children, which he explores mostly through Griffin. As the book begins, Griffin has pulled to the shoulder of a busy narrow road to take a call from his ill and cantankerous mother. Meanwhile, the trunk of his car holds an urn with the ashes of his father, which Griffin hopes to spread somewhere on Cape Cod, which his father loved. In many ways, this is a great start, since the engine driving TOCM is Griffin's process of coming to terms with his difficult parents, who have saddled him with ambivalences that drive everyone, including Laura, his loving daughter, crazy. TOCM is my third Russo novel--the others are Straight Man and Empire Falls. In all these novels, Russo shows wonderful touch, making his characters real, sympathetic, and believably muddled. He also has a great gift for gentle insight and a knack for exploring emotional dilemmas so that they transcend the plight of single characters. Russo really does fine work. Even so, Russo did seem to take short-cuts at times in TOCM, allowing his characters to make perfect and apt comments (the script) instead of exploring his characters through their actions. Further, there were moments that crossed the line to sentimentality. And, do we really need so much information about the dynamics in Laura's high school? Regardless, everything comes together nicely in Part Two, with the scene at the yew tree both humorous and violent, as if to combine highpoints in "Straight Man" and "Empire Falls". Of course, it's just my opinion. But Richard Dreyfuss may be too

Few authors have the ability to create characters so profound you feel like you've known them all your life. Updike could do that. These people stay with you long after you've read the book. They are flawed people who struggle though life like we all do, but somehow you can't help but like them because they deal with the same issues we all do. Russo is a master at reading their thoughts, and our own, and writing it all so deftly we find we're laughing and cringing and sympathizing and rooting for the characters and ourselves along the way. Jack Griffin would like not to be carrying his parents' running commentary in his head and would like not to be carrying their ashes in the trunk of his car, but can't seem to get rid of either as he struggles to make sense of his life and how it has been impacted by their problems. The elusive idea of magic happiness he has both fought and sought all his life is in each of us and isn't easy to grip firmly enough to examine and cast aside, making room for the real thing. One of the highest praises of fiction is its ability, when done really well, to help us see inside ourselves. Russo can do that. We come to know Jack Griffin in this story, but the real gift, if we look, is that we come to know ourselves better, too.