That Old Cape Magic

That Old Cape Magic (2009), a novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo, centers on the life of Jack Griffin, a former LA screenwriter who now lives in New England and works as a professor. Nearing retirement age, over the course of a year, Jack is forced to come to grips with the deaths of both parents, and the long-repressed undercurrents of his own tenuous marriage. As with most of Russo's work, That Old Cape Magic is concerned with place – specifically, New England – which features in the work with the force and regularity of a main character; many of the important events in the novel are tied to a specific location.

As the book begins, Jack Griffin is on his way to a friend's wedding. A former hack screenwriter, who dreamed for years of releasing the next big movie (and never did), Jack now teaches at a fancy Northeastern university. He has a wife named Joy, and a daughter named Laura, and to judge by appearances, all is well.

Nevertheless, appearances are only just that. Jack's life does not lack discontentment or drama – the majority of which has, traditionally, come from his parents. William and Mary Griffin, like Jack, are both professors – English professors who never realized their dreams of teaching at a top-notch university, and now are settled in the Midwest. The two strong personalities have never really gotten along, and their marriage is a tragicomic spectacle of constant, petty competition, abounding in slights and indiscreet affairs. One thing they have in common, however, is their outrageous snobbery. Their first reaction to hearing about Jack's wife, Joy, as he describes in a flashback, is to ask where she did her graduate work. When Jack reveals that Joy has never done graduate work, having entered the workforce after completing her bachelor's degree, Jack's stunned mother exclaims, "But what sort of person doesn't do graduate work?"



His parents' effect on his life is one of That Old Cape Magic's overriding concerns. The title refers to the location, Cape Cod, where Jacks' parents summered every summer while he was growing up, and where he is headed himself, at the start of the novel, to attend his daughter's best friend's wedding. A lifetime later, Jack returns to Cape Cod, now with his late father's ashes packed into an urn in the backseat. He reflects on how, for example, each year when they returned to Cape Cod, his parents would sort through local real estate brochures, tossing them into one of two categories: “Can’t Afford It” and “Wouldn’t Have It as a Gift.” Memories of their perpetual dissatisfaction strike a chord with Jack, forcing him to confront several troubling realities. First among these is just how badly he has failed in his mission of not turning into his parents. Compounding his angst: death has not encouraged his mother to make peace with her former husband, whom she continues to criticize and berate even after his death, detailing for Jack many agonizingly intimate tales of his shortcomings.

However, Jack's own life is not perfect either, although he is not at first aware of it. He is less close to his daughter and wife than he thinks. Wrapped up in his own struggle to accept a life that doesn't fully sate him, he has failed to wonder whether the rest of his family might harbor any misgivings of their own. When Jack and Joy were first married, he wanted to take their honeymoon at the Cape, despite Joy's wish to spend it near the cozy, if unimpressive, cabin her family had rented summers when she was a child. Jack had his way, and they honeymooned in Truro, where they signed the “Great Truro Accord”: Jack would leave screenwriting and Los Angeles, and the two would move to New England to live quiet, safe, conventional lives – which they did. Three decades later, Jack is restless and resentful.

A year after Jack's initial return to Cape Cod, he is at a second wedding, his daughter Laura's. His mother is now dead – and so, it seems, is his former marriage, also following his parents’ pattern. Jack is forced to finally confront the difference between the life he has lived, the life he thought he wanted – and the one he now wants.



That Old Cape Magic might tentatively be described as a dark comedy, full of pointed satire at the bourgeoisie posturing of folks like the elder Griffins. However, the emotional force of the novel lies in Russo's alternation of moments of hilarity with others of deep melancholy and regret. In some ways, That Old Cape Magic attempts a late-life bildungsroman, the coming into wisdom of its near-retirement age protagonist – a span of human experience that is very rarely the focus of novels.