Sitting at a “leftover table’’ at the wedding of his daughter’s best friend, Jack Griffin, the main character in Richard Russo’s new novel, pumps his fist in solidarity with the young people on the dance floor, as they shout the refrain of a Jon Bon Jovi tune: “Oh-oh! We’re halfway there.’’ Worried that his wife, Joy, was right - that he had “too little faith - in the world, in her, in himself, in their good lives’’ - Griffin wonders whether he wants, once again, to be halfway there. And whether, in not so quiet desperation, with evidence of a “fundamentally crappy world’’ all around him, he is “Livin’ on a Prayer.’’
No day at the beach
With an idealized Cape Cod as a central metaphor, a middle-aged screenwriter finally - painfully -grows up
A meditation on marriage and other family ties, “That Old Cape Magic’’ was originally conceived as a short story. It is less dense, deep, and ambitious than Russo’s last two novels, “Empire Falls’’ and “Bridge of Sighs.’’ Indeed, in less skilled hands, it might well have collapsed into cliché, as it examined the education of a middle-aged, middle-class mope. Happily, however, Russo retains a magic that is anything but black and white, stale, or trite. This novel is suffused with his signature comic sensibility, and with insights, by turns tender and tough, about human frailty, forbearance, fortitude, and fervor.
For much of his life, Jack Griffin has tried to distance himself from his parents. English professors with Ivy League pedigrees, Bill and Mary Griffin “had been less wed to each other than a shared sense of grievance’’ over being exiled to a university in Indiana, the only institution that offered a job to both of them. To make life more tolerable, they rent a house on Cape Cod for a month every summer; have affairs, and pretend to be wounded when they’re discovered; get divorced; and (unhappily) remarried.
To make clear to himself - and them - that he rejects their values, Jack goes west instead of east for college, becomes a screenwriter, and marries a girl who hasn’t done graduate work (his mother’s greatest barometer of personal worth) and has a sister who in a game of Twenty Questions takes on the fictional identity of “Princess Grace of ‘Morocco.’ ’’
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