That Old Cape Magic

That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo didn’t quite live up to the expectation I had after how much I enjoyed Russo’s Empire Falls earlier this year. Maybe that’s what you get for starting with the Pulitzer Prize winning novel. That Old Cape Magic wasn’t bad by any means, but not particularly memorable either. That could also have played a role in why it’s taken over a month for me to write this review.

Jack Griffin is a fifty-something writing professor in New England. When the book starts he’s attending the wedding of one his daughter’s friends, his own marriage is starting to fall apart and he’s dealing with the loss of his father. Flash forward a year and now he’s attending his daughter’s wedding, he’s separated from his wife, and dealing with the loss of his mother. All of this turmoil causes Jack to look back at how he got here. How his own parents’ failed relationship (they ended up divorced) affected him, and where he went wrong in his own marriage and in his (not always so civil) interaction with his in-laws. And while this description might make it seem like a depressing story, there’s actually plenty of humor injected into all of the events.

My biggest complaint about the novel is that it seemed more like a screenplay for a made for TV movie (perhaps intentionally since Jack used to be a Hollywood screenwriter?). It was a relatively short book and a good “beach” read (I read none of it on a beach), but it was a bit clichéd for my taste.

One of the things I enjoyed about the book, though, was (what I’ll call) a theme of the story, and that was the idea that we all remember or interpret the events from our past differently. We see it with how Jack remembers scenes from his childhood vs. how his mother explains those same events. It’s there in how Jack views his in-laws vs. how they’re revealed as the story progresses. And we also see it in Jack and Joy’s differing viewpoints about parts of their marriage and what caused them to travel down the path towards their separation. It all made me remember why I thought Russo was such a good writer in the first place. And it’s a good thing too, because I have two more of his books on the shelf, which, like this book, were Borders store closing purchases (I know this because there is a big black marker strike through the UPC barcode – no returns!).

One last thing. Before I decided on That Old Cape Magic for my next read, I briefly decided to go with Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, which I had downloaded to my Kindle for free, mostly because my previous read, Drood, inspired me to try a Dickens novel (I hadn’t read one since high school). Well, I started it on the train home one day and it was tough going. In fact, I noticed that after two days I was still only at 2% complete (again, this is on my Kindle). So I went to amazon.com to see how long the book actually was (something I admittedly should have done earlier) only to find out that the Penguin Classics paperback edition is 953 pages! Um, so yeah, I set that book aside. Perhaps another time Mr. Dickens, perhaps another time. I just have a few dozen books that moved ahead in the queue though.

Next Up: The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova (I’m already 500 pages in!)