BOOKS: ‘That Old Cape Magic’

THAT OLD CAPE MAGIC
By Richard Russo
Knopf, $26.95, 262 pages
REVIEWED BY JOHN GREENYA

Every year, Jack Griffin’s parents would drive from the Midwest, where they were both unhappy-to-miserable college professors, to spend two weeks in a rented cottage somewhere on the beautiful island of Cape Cod, Mass., and as they crossed the Sagamore Bridge they would, as if on cue, begin to sing “That Old Cape Magic,” their altered version of “That Old Black Magic.”

While the Cape and the song were the same, the cottages never were, for the desirability of both site and structure depended on the couple’s often shaky finances. If the senior Griffins, who both taught at the same university (in what they bitterly referred to as “the Mid-[very familiar expletive deleted]-West”) had received some kind of raise or he had sold an academic book, for example, they rented a better cottage in a more desirable spot on the island. If not, which became increasingly the case over the years, then they took whatever they could get, and complained about it constantly.

Constantly Complaining should have been the elder Griffin’s vanity license plate, but it never would have been because they weren’t that honest with themselves (only with other people and only about their faults, some real, most imagined) and, predictably, considered vanity license plates hopelessly bourgeois. As thoroughly unlikable a fictional couple as I’ve had the misfortune to read about in years, Jack’s parents were: mean, vain, nasty, small-minded, and just about any other adjective along the same lines.

They were both also very intelligent and very well-educated, and therein lies — or lain or laid — the rub (the Griffins would tell me, archly, that there’s no past tense version of that Shakespeare quote, which they would also point out, condescendingly, is in fact a slight misquote from “Hamlet,” seeing as the line concludes with “ay, there’s the rub.”) As their son makes overabundantly clear, they went through life dissatisfied, a condition they rarely kept to themselves.

Both children of lower-middle class parents, they’d been raised in different cities in the “Rust Belt” of western New York State. “At Cornell, where they both went on scholarship, they’d met not only each other, but also the kind of friends who’d invited them home for holidays in Wellesley and Westchester and for summer vacations in the Hamptons or on the Cape … At Yale where they did their graduate work, they came to believe they were destined for research positions at one of the other Ivys, at least until the market for academics headed south and they had to take what they could get — the pickings even slimmer for a couple — and that turned out to be a huge state university in Indiana. Betrayed. That was how they felt. Why go to Cornell, to Yale, if Indiana was your reward?”

A bit condescending? Oh yeah, and that attitude is what in large part shaped Jack, an otherwise decent man who, when we meet him at 55, is carrying a whole lot of family baggage, his birth family and that of himself, his wife Joy and their lovely daughter Laura, who is out of school and of marriageable age. Some of that early family baggage is being carried literally — Jack’s got his father’s ashes in an urn in his trunk, and plans to distribute them at some suitable spot on the Cape once he gets his act together, something that has become harder and harder to do in recent years.

For decades, he and Joy had lived in Los Angeles where he had been half of a successful screenwriting duo. He and Tommy, his longtime friend and partner, did not see many of their B movie scripts make it to the big screen, which is par for the course, apparently, but they were well-paid for their labors, and Jack made a whole lot more money than his parents. But in an interesting twist, his wife Joy, who by contrast loves every member of her own family, dreams of owning a house in New England. So Jack, who had almost begun to believe himself when he said he should be writing a novel, found a job teaching creative writing in a small New England town, where he has been for almost two decades.

As “That Old Cape Magic” opens, Jack is driving, alone because Joy had a meeting she couldn’t skip and he wasn’t willing to wait another day. He is driving onto the Cape, where daughter Laura will be the maid of honor in her best friend’s wedding. That’s the first wedding trip to Cape Cod detailed in the book; the second, Laura’s own wedding, takes place a year later, by which time Jack and Joy are separated, and both have brought “dates.”

In the intervening year, Jack is called, almost constantly it seems, by his mother who hates all modern technology except her cell phone. As we learn, over and over (and over) again, she is as bitter and sarcastic as ever. She and Jack’s father had divorced some years ago, and both remarried, he to one of his graduate students and she to a fellow academic, a philosopher who sounds like the wisest and most sensible character in the book because the longer he is married to her the less and less he speaks.

To give you one more example of her poisonality, in one conversation she tells Jack that when her college honored her and several other teachers with a retirement dinner, her remarks were pointedly succinct and terribly typical: “’Unlike my colleagues,’ she said directly into the microphone, the only speaker of the evening to recognize that fundamental necessity, ’I’ll be brief and honest. I wish I could think of something nice to say about you people and this university, I really do. But the truth we dare not utter is that ours is distinctly second-rate, as are the majority of our students, as are we.’”

We also learn that when Jack’s father’s new young wife kept postponing turning her copious research notes into an actual dissertation, Jack’s father, in a stunning display of trickle-down academic plagiarism, wrote it for her.

A third of the way through “That Old Cape Magic” I’d had enough of Jack’s parents and halfway through far more than enough and near the end — especially in the three-page scene that describes the conclusion of Laura’s wedding reception, a scene that would have fit better in one of Jack and his partners less-plausible scripts — I’d pretty much had enough of Jack. But then, somewhat surprisingly, Richard Russo ends the book with a wonderfully ruminant few pages that show why his novels sell well (and why he won a Pulitzer in 2002 for “Empire Falls”).

One final caveat, and I don’t think I’m being pedantic: Someone should tell Mr. Russo that “begging the question” does not mean that a question is begging to be asked. (A term taught in logic courses, it means avoiding the question, really the opposite.) Apparently Mr. Russo’s editor doesn’t know that either, for by the end of the book I’d listed five and maybe even six cases of questions that the author told us all begged to be asked. If Jack Griffin had made this mistake even once, his mother would have killed him.

• John Greenya is a Washington-area writer.