That Old Cape Magic: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

Griffin has been tooling around for nearly a year with his father's ashes in the trunk, but his mother is still very much alive, and not shy about calling on his cell phone. She does so as he drives down to Cape Cod, where he and his wife, Joy, will celebrate the marriage of their daughter Laura's best friend. For Griffin this is akin to driving into the past, since he took his childhood summer vacations there, his parents' respite from the hated Midwest, and the Cape is where he and Joy honeymooned.

But by the end of this perfectly lovely weekend, the past has so thoroughly swamped the present that the future suddenly hangs in the balance. And when, a year later, a far more important wedding takes place, their beloved Laura's, Griffin's chauffeuring two urns of ashes as he contends once more with Joy and her large, unruly family, and both he and she have brought dates along. How in the world could this have happened?


From the Compact...

The Barnes & Noble Review

Middle-aged disappointment is a tough sell. It's a subject that can easily fall into bitterness, dreariness, unattractive self-pity. And like everything else, it's probably easier to deal with on summer vacation.

In That Old Cape Magic, Richard Russo takes on the novel of middle-aged reassessment, the marital breakup novel, the academic novel, and, what the hell, tosses in a bit of the Hollywood novel, as well. What's remarkable is that the thing holds up as well as it does. There are places where it could be funnier, places where Russo fails in the novelist's duty to go for the empathetic instead of the merely sharp surface observation. But he's a smooth and, when he's at his best, rueful writer. Reading That Old Cape Magic, you feel yourself sliding into the life changes Russo describes as easily as his protagonist, Jack Griffin.