That Old Cape Magic
by Richard Russo
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Book Reviews of That Old Cape Magic
Book Review: Salty and mature
Summary: 4 Stars
Jack Griffin is an irresolute 50-something guy driving around with a lot of dead weight, both figuratively and literally. As the novel opens, he is placing the ashes of his dead father (9 months in the urn now) in the wheel well of his car, (they have been in the trunk) intending to scatter them in Cape Cod. He is meeting his wife and daughter there for the wedding of his daughter's best friend. During this time, the lacunae of memory begin to break free and combat with the credo and convictions of his consciousness and close orbit. The bittersweet reminiscence of family vacations on the Cape with his parents and the tart taste of the "Truro Accord" he made with his wife on their honeymoon over three decades ago provide the propellant fuel for this story of late middle-age angst and awakening.
Russo navigates the banks of this novel with a constrained and firm hand on the tiller, with not too much wind in the sails and with a decidedly inner-directed course. And he seamlessly flows from the sober and contemplative to an uproarious physical comedy, placing him in the same league as Bellow, Roth, and Irving, with a laconic protagonist possessing tragically comic (or comically tragic) inner demons. Griffin's inability to complete a short story that he started years ago, for example, opens a chasm to a dark abyss that plagues him up and down Route 6 through the Cape, through the story. A rehearsal dinner for another wedding is headed for an imbroglio when a wheelchair ramp does the unexpected.
Russo triumphs when he concentrates on Griffin, a thoroughly three-dimensional character whose perceptions and failings and desires are authentic and prismatic. It is Griffin's character that illuminates his parents' and underscores the pathos of his wife, Joy. When other characters are seen through Griffin's emotional turbulence, they are interesting and affecting. However, when given their own free rein, they tend to flatten, lose their luminescence. A few characters even come across as red herrings. You need to come to your own conclusions about this canvas of characters--I don't want to ruin anyone's reading pleasure by diagramming every character or their worthiness to the story and its themes. These complaints of mine do prevent me from considering this novel flawless, but the story nonetheless has a resounding quality, with writing as smooth as sea glass and as craggy as the Cape coastline.
I grew up not terribly far from the Cape, and Russo brought back the magic of my own family vacations--crossing the Sagamore Bridge; eating oysters in Wellfleet; the cathedral spires in Truro; the moss, grey, blue of the ocean; and running up and down the sand dunes in Ptown--the dunes speckled with bleached green grass under a pale, hot sun.
As an addendum, I recommend this novel for the over-40 or 45. It is seasoned with the many nuanced issues more connected to the late-middle passages of life.
Book Review: In A Spin, Under That Old Black Magic
Summary: 4 Stars
"That old black magic has me in its spell, that old black magic that you weave so well.
Those icy fingers up and down my spine
That same old witchcraft when your eyes meet mine.
The same old tingle that I feel inside, and then that elevator starts its ride
And down and down I go, round and round I go, like a leaf that's caught in the tide.
I should stay away, but what can I do?
I hear your name and I'm aflame
Aflame with such a burning desire that only your kiss can put out the fire.
For you're the lover I have waited for, the mate that fate had me created for.
And every time your lips meet mine, darling, down and down I go, round and round I go
In a spin, loving the spin I'm in, under that old black magic called love."
Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer
Richard Russo has titled his novel after that old Frank Sinatra song' That Old Black Magic'.
The narrator of the novel, Griffin, and his parents would sing the song changing the Black to Cape everytime they crossed the Sagamore Bridge to Cape Cod. This was a place of summer remembrances for Griffen. His boyhood was made from this place and everything he remembered about his parents always came back to the Cape. Difficult parents to understand and difficult to love, but they were his. He did everything he could to separate himself from them, but he was a culmination of the two of them and everything he knew was partly because of them.
Nothing that Griffen did was ever good enough for his parents, his mother in particular. Both is mother and father were never happy and everyone knew it. It took Griffin, a separation from his wife,Joy, daughter, Laura, and a year away from his teaching post to learn this. This novel is about that year and what the past has wrought. Many of us go through this, tyring to find ourselves, figure out what we want in life and what we are made of. This is one of those novels that Richard Russo has given us to help examine our lives as we read about Griffen and his toils and troubles. Russo has inserted the love of teaching in this novel and has brought us back to the literary world of college and the extreme opposite, that of Hollywood and script writing. The lives Griffen crosses and how he interacts with those souls is a lesson for us all. It is sometimes the wise partners we have who understand us the best and give us the directions we need.
These are the times that bind, the midlife crisis. The perfect life, the perfect job, the perfect marriage, none of these exist. Life is what we make it, after all.
Highly Recommended. prisrob 08-12-09
Straight Man: A Novel
Bridge of Sighs: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)
Book Review: Russo's Magic Touch
Summary: 5 Stars
I can't believe Russo has published a book so soon after Bridge of Sighs. I, for one, am thrilled!
That Old Cape Magic is a story centered around two weddings, each a year apart. Russo is a master at weaving together tales of his character's past with the conflicts of the present. Griffin, a cynical and gloomy college professor and therefore a rather suspect protagonist, is feeling restless in his very "settled" life in Connecticut. He feels that being "settled" is the equivalent of "settling." He toys with the idea of going back to L.A. where he was once a quasi-successful screenwriter.
His wife doesn't feel the same way and therein lies some of the conflict.
Griffin is also reeling from the deaths of each of his highly dysfunctional, divorced parents, and in a darkly humorous plot line, ends up spending a good part of the novel carrying around both of their ashes in his car, waiting for the appropriate time to dump them somewhere in Cape Cod. His parents ended up "settling" in what they called "the mid-f-ing-west," which to them was the equivalent of purgatory, and Griffin is forever fearful of ending up as bitter as they were in his predictable life in New England.
Griffin is resentful of his parents and he projects his distrust and dislike of them onto his in-laws and other parental units who pop in and out of the story. (More conflict!) Russo brilliantly examines Griffin's hang-ups with his parents without becoming too Freudian.
Even though Griffin recognizes the utter mess of his parent's marriage, he can't seem to help but emulate them, insisting that he and his wife honeymoon in Cape Cod, the very place his parents vacationed each summer. And it is reasons like this that make Griffin, initially, a hard guy to like or understand. But as he begins to understand himself, the reader is able to empathize with him and truly hope he gets it together.
The character's are really well written. From Griffin's Marine twin brothers-in-law who despise him to his wife's stepmother "Dot" (love the scene where everyone is running around yelling "Where's Dot Dammitt!") to his mother who won't shut up even after she is dead to his sweet, worrisome daughter. These are vintage Russo characters, perfect representations of the reason I adore his novels and short stories.
The comedy is more subtle than in Straight Man or even Nobody's fool, but it is there, especially in the witty dialogue. There are so few authors who can write heartwrenching material while maintaining a crisp, fresh, and in Russo's case, wry sense of humor.
Liked this a lot better than Bridge of Sighs, a novel whose ending was over-the-top, in my opinion. That Old Cape Magic makes for an incredibly satisfying read and will cause Russo's greatest fans to long for another novel soon.
Book Review: Wedding Magic to Comedy
Summary: 4 Stars
Richard Russo's genius -- in such novels as "Empire Falls," "Mohawk," "Nobody's Fool" -- is to link a vivid sense of place (upstate New York, Maine usually) with the rich inner life of his characters. In "That Old Cape Magic," his newest novel, he accomplishes this again -- with a twist. The point here is that the place -- Cape Cod, where the protagonist vacationed as the only child of embittered and unhappily married English professor parents -- fails to live up to its role as bearer of dreams and magic. Place turns out to be a poor index of character, and that old Cape magic turns out to be weak, false, black magic if magic at all.
The main plot, already described by other reviewers, is complicated and enlivened by the competing stories about his life that the narrator Jack Griffin entertains over the course of the story. The book is framed by two weddings -- that of the narrator's daughter's close friend Kelsey and that of the daughter Laura herself -- and marriage is a major theme of the novel. But close behind is a second plot and second theme -- having to do with the legacies and curses with which our families of origin burden us all -- and this plot is advanced through a fictional but autobiographical story that the narrator, a screenwriter and English professor himself, is writing and revising throughout the book: "The Summer of the Brownings." This subplot allows Russo to explore the interesting question of whether what we remember is ever really the truth or whether we are all always revising and embellishing our pasts. Again, we reach the question of the link between place and character. It turns out that Cape Cod is not the Shangri La of the protagonist's youth. Real magic is not something that happens TO a person; Griffin learns instead that he must be the author of his own meaning.
But I'm making this book sound too heavy. It's so entertaining and a really fast read (note that there are 4 reviews here 3 days after the book was released). Russo is an incorrigible romantic. At the same time, the writing is crisp; the dialogue (even with his deceased parents whose ashes he carries around in his trunk) is delicious. The comedy and pratfalls are reminiscent of Russo's great comic masterpiece "Straight Man" (a book that should be read by everyone in the world).
But there lies my only criticism. Russo overdoes it with the black eyes, fender benders, comic falls, and emergency room dramas; as the book careens toward its moving conclusion, one wishes he would trust more to the inner sweetness of the characters he has created (especially Griffin whose kinder, dearer version is struggling to be born from his crusty shell) and fall back less on the jokes and pratfalls. This moving book doesn't need them.
Book Review: Loved It!
Summary: 5 Stars
In That Old Cape Magic, the protagonist, Jack Griffin, is a 57 year old, only child of academia parents. As a child, Jack and his parents spent one month every summer on Cape Cod, traveling there from Indiana. Years later, Jack and his wife Joy spent their honeymoon on Cape Cod, where they planned for their future.
The story begins with a wedding on Cape Cod, and ends with a wedding in Maine. The setting, Cape Cod is significant, because, this is the year that Jack's life will be transformed. Cape Cod is the place where Jack struggles to find meaning in his life, and at the same time he is struggling with his own mortality. As Jack arrives at the Cape for the wedding of his daughter Lauren's best friend, he is carrying in his trunk, an urn with his father's ashes. His father died unexpectedly, nine months earlier, but Jack is looking for just the right place to scatter his remains.
Jack's parents, are flawed but memorable characters. They were Ive-League educated, but bitterly resigned to the fact they were only able to teach at "second rate" mid western colleges. Extremely critical people, they cheated on each other, squandered their money away, and thought they were better than most everyone they met. Although they thought Cape Cod was paradise, even there they seemed unhappy with their life.
Jack's parents are portrayed so vividly, that I will never forget them.
(Jack's mother speaking to her granddaughter about colleges): "Do you know what kind of people send their progeny to Williams?" "Rich, privileged, white, republican. Or, Even worse, people who-aspire to all that". (Not so unlike your other grandparents she meant). "Their kids aren't smart enough to get into any Ivy, but they have to go somewhere, so God created Williams".
(Jack reflecting on his father): "His father had left the world in about the same financial condition. Not much to show for life, he couldn't help thinking, though Thoreau would have been pleased. Simplicity, Simplicity, Simplicity".
Told over a time span of one year, and ending with his own daughter's wedding in Maine, That Old Cape Magic, is ultimately a story about coming to terms with one's life.
It was a story that made me think about who I am. How who we are, what we've done with our lives, and the profound effect that our parents, and our childhood has had on our lives. As a baby boomer myself, this story rang true: we are who we are because of them. This story is funny, touching, and reflective. At times I was not sure if the tears in my eyes were tears from laughter or tears of sadness. A wonderful story that moved me deeply, and will stay with me for a long time to come. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED