Following Bridge of Sighs—a national best seller hailed by
The Boston Globe as “an astounding achievement” and “a
masterpiece”—Richard Russo gives us the story of a
marriage, and of all the other ties that bind, from parents
and in-laws to children and the promises of youth.
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?
That Old Cape Magic is a novel of deep introspection and
every family feeling imaginable, with a middle-aged man
confronting his parents and their failed marriage, his own
troubled one, his daughter’s new life and, finally, what it
was he thought he wanted and what in fact he has. The
storytelling is flawless throughout, moments of great
comedy and even hilarity alternating with others of rueful
understanding and heart-stopping sadness, and its ending is
at once surprising, uplifting and unlike anything this
Pulitzer Prize winner has ever written.
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