That Old Cape Magic
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Jack and Joy Griffin are back on Cape Cod - where they spent their hope-filled honeymoon - for a wedding. Cracks are begining to show in Jack's peaceful family life and thirty-four year marriage. He's driving round with his father's ashes in an urn in the boot of his car, haunted by memories of bittersweet family holidays spent at the Cape, while his acerbic mother is very much alive and always on his mobile. He's spent a lifetime trying to be happier than his parents, but has he succeeded?
A year later, at a second wedding, Jack has a second urn in the car, and his life is starting to unravel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Crafting a dense, flashback-filled narrative that stutters across two summer outings to New England (and as many weddings), Russo (Empire Falls) convincingly depicts a life coming apart at the seams, but the effort falls short of the literary magic that earned him a Pulitzer. A professor in his 50s who aches to go back to screenwriting, Jack Griffin struggles to divest himself of his parents. Lugging around, first, his father's, then both his parents' urns in the trunk of his convertible, he hopes to find an appropriate spot to scatter their ashes while juggling family commitments his daughter's wedding, a separation from his wife. Indeed, his parents especially his mother, who calls her son incessantly before he starts hearing her from beyond the grave occupy the narrative like capricious ghosts, and Griffin inherits "the worst attributes of both." Though Russo can write gorgeous sentences and some situations are amazingly rendered Griffin wading into the surf to try to scatter his father's ashes, his wheelchair-bound father-in-law plummeting off a ramp and into a yew the navel-gazing interior monologues that constitute much of the novel lack the punch of Russo's earlier work.
