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Title details for That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo - Available

That Old Cape Magic

A Novel

by Richard Russo
Arthur Morey
Audiobook
1 of 2 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 2 copies available
Griffin has been tooling around for nearly a year with his father’s ashes in the trunk, but his mother is still 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 there, his parents’ respite from the hated Midwest, and the Cape is where he and Joy honeymooned.
    
But 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, 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?

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 4, 2009

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781415966259
      • File size: 262918 KB
      • Duration: 09:07:44

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Russo's middle-aged protagonist, Griffin, confronts his parents' failed marriage, his own troubled marriage, and his unattained ambitions. He never again achieves the joy inherent in his early childhood recollections of summers on Cape Cod. Recounting his parents' academic lives, fraught with intellectual snobbery and combative bickering, Griffin, a screenwriter turned English professor, never ceases to be baffled by their pretentious superiority. Arthur Morey grasps Russo's moments of cynical despair as well as the story's hilarity. His calculated narration develops distinct characters through artful and well-defined emotional pathos. His approach deftly captures Russo's depiction of life's ironies and comedy. A.W. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 29, 2009
      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.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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