Published August 4, 2009 by Knopf (a division of RandomHouse)
I’m having a hell of a time writing a concise summary of this phenomenal novel, so here’s one from the publisher:
Griffin has been tooling around for nearly a year with his father’s ashes in the trunk, but his mother is 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 here, his parents’ respite from the hated Midwest. And the Cape is where he and Joy honeymooned, in the course of which they drafted the Great Truro Accord, a plan for their lives together that’s now thirty years old and has largely come true. He’d left screenwriting and Los Angeles behind for the sort of New England college his snobby academic parents had always aspired to in vain; they’d moved into an old house full of character; and they’d started a family. Check, check and check.
But be careful what you pray for, especially if you manage to achieve it. 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, on the coast of Maine, 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?
I’ve loved all of Richard Russo’s novels, and That Old Cape Magic was no exception. Russo has an incredible way of plumbing the depths of marriage and family and exploring the ways in which we discover our selves through our relationships with others. As Griffin reflects on his childhood summers on the Cape, which were the only times he saw his parents—embittered academics stuck at a second-rate institution in the “mid-fucking-west”—appear anything close to happy, he begins to understand the ways in which he has reenacted their marriage in his own. And as he recalls his Cape honeymoon and the Great Truro Accord, he is forced to ask himself how well he and Joy have actually measured up to the course they charted thirty years ago.
Russo has said that in many ways That Old Cape Magic is about inheritance, about the things we absorb from our parents and the fact that we cannot escape becoming them, no matter how hard we try. Despite Griffin’s belief that the best motto is “a plague on both their houses” and his attempts to prevent his and Joy’s parents from influencing their lives, his trip to the Cape and the events that follow make it clear that that is an impossible task.
Like his parents, Griffin is cynical and unsatisfied, and he comes to understand that he actually resents his wife for her constant contentedness. Whether it matches up to the Great Truro Accord or not, Joy is happy with the life they’ve created, whereas Griffin—at least in his present state of mid-life-crisis–longs for something different and finds himself attempting to relive the past. But that’s the thing about memory: the joy is in remembering, and attempts to recreate even the most beautiful moments can never be fully realized.
Much of the Cape’s allure was its shimmering elusiveness, the magical way it receded before them year after year, the stuff of dreams.
As Griffin journeys to the Cape with his father’s ashes in tow, he must face the truth that despite his best efforts, he has become his parents, right down to recapitulating his father’s frequent fender benders.
Even as he rejected their values, he’d allowed many of their bedrock assumptions—that happiness was a place you could visit but never own, for instance—to burrow deep.
In That Old Cape Magic, Russo explores memory and disappointment and mid-life re-evaluation with sharp insight and gentle humor. He sees his characters’ flaws and isn’t afraid to expose them, but he does so with kindness and understanding. He illustrates the mundane intimacies of marriage and family life in heartbreaking detail, but he never fails to make us laugh along the way.
In many ways, That Old Cape Magic is classic Russo. The themes and character outlines—and the presentation of hilariously humorless academics—will be familiar to readers who have enjoyed his other work, but the scope of this book is smaller, cozier, than anything he’s written previously. And I thought it was a refreshing shift.
No other writer writes about relationships and expectations the way Richard Russo does, and That Old Cape Magic is simply not to be missed. 5 out of 5.
For more information, read about my evening with Richard Russo, and check out this interview he did with fellow author Pat Conroy.
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