That Old Cape Magic
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls delivers his most intimate novel yet: "An astute portrait of a 30-year marriage, in all its promise and pain…. His honest, heartfelt storytelling—like a cooling breeze off a certain New England shoreline—has never felt fresher" (People).
For Griffin, all paths, all memories, converge at Cape Cod. The Cape is where he took his childhood summer vacations, where he and his wife, Joy, honeymooned, where they decided he’d leave his LA screenwriting job to become a college professor, and where they celebrated the marriage of their daughter Laura’s best friend. But when their beloved Laura’s wedding takes place a year later, Griffin is caught between chauffeuring his mother’s and father’s ashes in two urns and contending with Joy and her large, unruly family. Both he and she have also brought dates along. How in the world could this have happened? By turns hilarious, rueful, and uplifting, That Old Cape Magic is a profoundly involving novel about marriage, family, and all the other ties that bind.
Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.
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.
