That Old Cape Magic
by Richard Russo
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Book Reviews of That Old Cape Magic
Book Review: Looking For That "Happy" Place
Summary: 5 Stars
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 someone he makes unhappy, Jack's desire to be rid of his parents' influence and, most importantly, his desire for a place to scatter their ashes. This book is chock full of everything an avid reader is looking for. I can't say enough about it.
On a personal note, I really related to the main character in this book being so close in age and experiencing two weeks of bliss each year while on summer vacations with my own family. In my case, it wasn't the Cape, it was Riverhead out near the Hamptons. Taking that car ride from Brooklyn, New York and traveling on Montauk Highway until we finally passed "The Big White Duck" which was, in a sense, our Sagamore Bridge, is something I vividly remember. From that point on, my three brothers and I knew everything was going to be happy. My mother liked my Dad more during those two weeks of the year and even thought her four kids weren't too much of a burden.
Russo talks about happiness perhaps being "a place". This gave me some food for thought because I clearly could relate to that place (Riverhead) bringing me more happiness as a young child than anything I had ever known. Are we all searching for that happy place? Surely Jack was in That Old Cape Magic. You'll have to read the book to see if Jack finds his "place of happiness".
Book Review: Leaves us hoping for better things from an author we know is eminently capable of them
Summary: 3 Stars
In novels like his Pulitzer Prize-winning EMPIRE FALLS and BRIDGE OF SIGHS, Richard Russo has established himself as the Charles Dickens of lower middle class life in the dying towns of upstate New York. His latest novel reaches back to the territory he visited in 1997's STRAIGHT MAN, and the mixed results make us long for the depth of his more recent works.
Russo's protagonist, Jack Griffin, is a 57-year-old tenured English professor at a small liberal arts college in Connecticut. His career as a Hollywood screenwriter is two decades behind him, but he has never shed the itch to ditch his comfortable, quiet life and return there. That lingering unease comes into sharp focus in two trips to the beach, the first to Cape Cod to celebrate the wedding of his daughter's childhood best friend, and the second, a year later, for his own daughter's wedding in Maine. By the time of the latter, Griffin and his wife, Joy, an assistant dean of admissions at the college where he teaches, have separated. He can't shake his resentment over her long-ago infatuation with Tommy, his former screenwriting partner, and she resists his desire to abandon the security of academia that for her represents the fulfillment of their Cape Cod honeymoon pact that Griffin sarcastically entitles the "Great Truro Accord."
Griffin's angst is symbolized by the fact that, when he arrives for the first wedding, he's been carting his father's ashes around in the wheel well of his trunk for nine months (when he returns for his daughter's wedding, his mother's urn is there, too). His hapless attempt to dispose of his father's remains one foggy morning is one of the novel's two slapstick set pieces (the other a mishap on the eve of his daughter's wedding that sends several guests to the emergency room) that give the impression that perhaps Russo's intentions are less serious here than they might otherwise appear.
Griffin's parents, two Yale-educated English professors, perform something of the role of a Greek chorus in the novel. He spares few details of their dissatisfaction with academic careers (played out mostly in territory they refer to as the "Mid-[...]-West") that never matched the brilliant success they envisioned for themselves, along with their casual infidelities. Their lives are echoed, on a more pallid scale, in his own, a fact Griffin is honest enough to recognize: "The problem seemed to be that you could put a couple thousand miles between yourself and your parents, and make clear to them that in doing so you meant to reject their values, but how did you distance yourself from your own inheritance?"
It's that feeling that Griffin's life isn't much more than a warmed-over version of his parents' that prevents us from fully engaging with him. Maybe it's a bit unfair to compare the character with epic protagonists like John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom or Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe, but for all the pleasures to be derived from Russo's skill at creating the supporting cast, the modest irritations that burden Griffin simply don't offer sufficient heft to sustain our interest in their resolution over the course of even this relatively brief novel. Yes, he has unresolved issues with his parents. And yes, he's troubled by his wife's old attraction to Tommy. But none of this rises to a level that ever seems to justify the emotional black cloud that dogs him. It's easy to empathize with Joy's sentiment that "his unhappiness had exhausted her, that it would be a relief not to have to deal with it anymore."
In an interview in connection with the publication of the book, Russo revealed that the novel began as a short story. Indeed, Griffin tells an affecting tale, "The Summer of the Brownings," based on his visit to the Cape as a 12-year-old, that he wrote years earlier and now fusses with, despairing over the prospect of publication. Perhaps this finished product illustrates some of the perils of making the transition from one literary form to another. THAT OLD CAPE MAGIC's trip into one man's less-than-compelling mid-life crisis is a pleasant enough way to while away a few hours on a sunny beach this August. But it leaves us hoping for better things from an author we know is eminently capable of them.
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg
Book Review: Two weddings and a mid-life self-destruction
Summary: 4 Stars
Framed by two weddings, Pulitzer Prize-winning (Empire Falls) author Russo's latest is a darkly comic contemplation of a man's inner self-destructiveness.
After his last day of classes at the Maine university where he teaches screenwriting, Jack Griffin and his wife, Joy, traditionally take off for a New York holiday. This year their daughter's best friend is getting married on the Cape so, tradition derailed, Joy schedules meetings. Jack's resulting fit of pique spirals into a lonely night in Boston and a solitary drive to the Cape. "Once you'd packed a bag in front of a woman there was no possibility of unpacking...."
Crossing the Sagamore Bridge onto the Cape he finds himself dwelling on his parents' summer traditions. "Zipping along Route 6, Griffin realized he was humming `That Old Black Magic,' the song his parents had sung ironically - both university English professors, that's how they did most things - every time they crossed the Sagamore, substituting Cape for black."
Ivy-League educated, destined for great things in academia, his parents had found themselves stuck in the hated Midwest, unable to find a university back East that would take them both. Their summer vacation on the Cape, steeped in shared habits - the fantasy of real estate booklets, and breakfasts with "Al Fresco" - kept them together despite bitterness and mutual adulteries.
At his wedding to Joy, Griffin's mother had described her marriage: " `One glorious month each summer,' she explained. `Sun. Sand. Water. Gin. Followed by eleven months of misery.' " Then added, " `But that's about par for most marriages, I think you'll find.' "
Though Joy would have preferred the coast of Maine, they had spent their honeymoon on the Cape where they dreamed up the Great Truro Accord, a plan for the future that 30 years later, has all come true. Except for the novel he'd planned to write. Still, they had a wonderful daughter and he'd left the money-driven L.A. rat race of a screenwriter's life for a tenured professorship. He had a good life.
A few annoyances - his parents, for instance, and hers. Griffin had managed to keep his parents at arms' length, but Joy's big, gregarious (uneducated) family was a different story. To his bafflement Joy actually wanted to spend time with them.
And now Griffin's father is dead and Griffin has been carrying his ashes around for a year. He plans to scatter them on this trip to the Cape, but every opportunity seems not quite right. His mother keeps calling him on his cell and, while her health is not great, there's nothing frail about her caustic wit.
Over the weekend Griffin finds himself increasingly mired in the past, particularly one magical summer vacation when he made a friend, became inseparable, then sabotaged the friendship deliberately, all in two weeks. This episode was the basis for his one literary attempt, but the story had fallen flat. His parents kept intruding into the narrative of boyhood bliss.
By the end of the weekend Griffin has successfully sabotaged his marriage and the second half of the book opens a year later, with the impending wedding of his daughter on the coast of Maine.
Griffin has spent most of the year in an unsuccessful attempt to resurrect his screenwriting career in L.A. He and Joy will both be attending their daughter's wedding with dates. Joy's family, while they hold him responsible for her unhappiness, has promised to be cordial. And Griffin now has both parents in urns in the back of his car. Now that his mother can no longer call him, she keeps up a running commentary in his mind.
By turns hilarious and darkly brooding, the story explores one man's frank appraisal of whence he came, his understanding and rejection of everything his parents represent, and his nearly total lack of self-knowledge. There is inherent melancholy in recognizing this common condition and in the realization that we cannot escape our pasts, particularly if we try to run from them.
A deeply thoughtful and funny character study, Russo's latest has the gorgeous prose and intense characterizations his fans rely on if not quite the narrative drive of Nobody's Fool or Empire Falls.
Book Review: "How quickly it has all fallen apart."
Summary: 4 Stars
Fifty-five year old Jack Griffin has been in a funk for a very long time. The only child of dysfunctional and embittered college professors, he proudly asserts that he aggressively rejected his mother and father's warped values, their snobbery, their refusal to compromise, and their chronic dissatisfaction. In Richard Russo's bittersweet "That Old Cape Magic," Griffin discovers, much to his chagrin, that he has inherited his parents' negativity and selfishness. He may pay a steep price for his failure to come to terms with his troubled past. Jack's wife of thirty years, the ironically named Joy, is growing weary of her husband's immaturity and discontent.
Richard Russo is a master storyteller who, with humor and wit, demonstrates how certain people perversely destroy what is most precious to them. Jack's parents were academics who never achieved the professional glory that they craved. Both were adulterers, although his father was a more blatant philanderer. His mother and father ignored Jack and were critical of his choices. Joy, on the other hand, came from a noisy and large blue-collar family, and she always felt loved and valued. Although Jack enjoyed brief success as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, he and his wife eventually moved to Connecticut, where they raised their daughter, Laura. Although Jack and his wife still care for one another, they are gradually drifting apart; soon, their relationship may be beyond repair.
"That Old Cape Magic" goes back and forth in time, giving us glimpses into Griffin's memories, dreams, fears, and regrets. Each character in the book sees reality differently, and we sometimes wonder if anyone's "truth" can be taken at face value. Russo creates some amusingly quirky individuals, including Laura's college friend, a stiff and proper Korean named Sunny Kim, who is academically brilliant but socially inept; Tommy, Jack's friend and collaborator, who is as every bit as short-sighted and self-involved as his old pal; Joy's father, Harve, whom Griffin denigrates for his lack of breeding and bad taste; and Marguerite, an attractive but needy woman whose kind heart has been broken once too often. Russo embellishes each scene and conversation with exquisite detail, lively dialogue, and well-crafted figurative language. As we get to know and understand Jack Griffin, we sympathize with his angst. At the same time, we want to shake him for behaving so childishly.
The author inserts a number of delightfully comic moments into his narrative. They feature such props as a too-tall Christmas tree, a collapsing ramp, a talkative and opinionated ghost, an urn filled with ashes, and a pair of pugnacious twins. The concluding pages are a bit too busy; Russo goes off in too many directions as he frantically tries to wrap up his story. Fortunately, he manages to come up with a conclusion that is both satisfying and entertaining.
The title is a metaphor for the power of fantasy. Jack's father believed in the special qualities of Cape Cod, hoping that if he and his wife surrounded themselves with beauty, then harmony, tenderness, and passion would somehow prevail over discord, anger, and indifference. Jack's parents learned to their dismay that, although a lovely place may revitalize a marriage, it cannot work its magic indefinitely. A loving partnership is created and sustained by mature individuals who, in spite of their flaws and life's inevitable disappointments, make a valiant effort to treat one another with understanding and compassion.
Book Review: Gentle Insight about Marriage and Parenting
Summary: 5 Stars
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 old to play Griffin in the movie.