Richard Russo’s That Old Cape Magic is a novel with two weddings, neither one the protagonist’s own, but both frame his own marital relationship. Griffin, the protagonist, must come to terms with his own failed marriage as well as his parents’ as he grapples with letting go of his father (he has been driving around with the ashes in his trunk for almost a year.) Russo deals with the universal fear of becoming one’s parents. Following in his parents’ footsteps careerwise, Jack Griffin, a fifty- seven year old ex-screenwriter, now an English professor, tries desperately to avoid reenacting their marital problems as he fumbles through his own. Russo’s vision into the human psyche and the crises middle aged men experience, is humorous and poignant. “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.”
Wedding number one, of his daughter Laura’s best friend, brings Griffin and his wife, Joy, out to Cape Cod, the scene of many childhood vacations for Griffin. But as the wedding weekend commences, the past and its problems begin to overtake him and the problems of the past, and Griffin’s present marital difficulties become a jumbled mess. A year later, at his daughter’s wedding, Griffin is now driving two urns around, his mother having recently died. Russo draws in Joy’s unruly family, who provide pages of comic relief, slight violence and numerous hospital trips.
What does Jack Griffin want out of life? This is the question that Richard Russo delves into while writing about the ins and out of family, marriage and childrearing.
Left in a tangle of broken relationships, Griffin must deal with real life for once. “Had he been writing this scene in a script, the conversation wouldn’t have ended up there. His fictional daughter would have asked the obvious questions… But it wasn’t a script, and his real life daughter was too kind to say what she was thinking, maybe even too kind to think it.”
Russo, a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist has written six other novels. The 1994 film Nobody’s Fool was adapted from the novel of the same name. Russo was recently at Mount Holyoke along with his student David Wroblewski, who wrote The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Russo’s sense of humor was apparent throughout Valerie Martin’s interview. Russo said, “The most unforgivable thing in a novel is hopelessness. Art is essentially a hopeful thing to do.” Although the character of Jack Griffin appears to be a hopeless cause, his ability to pull himself through middle age with humor and honesty makes this a worthy read.
That Old Cape Magic
By Richard Russo
272 pp. Knopf. $25.95
