Looking forward to "That Old Cape Magic"

As we planned our East coast camping trip this summer, I looked up fiction that had something to do with Maine or Cape Cod. One title popped up under both subjects, That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo. He’s the author of the Pulitzer-winning novel Empire Falls, which is a book I really enjoyed, for lack of a better word. Empire Falls is not a happy book; it’s actually quite depressing. But I absolutely loved Miles, the main character, and I felt like I could breathe the air of the dying mill town that he lived in.

That Old Cape Magic is about a couple married for 30 years; Griffin is still in love with Joy. They go back to Cape Cod for a wedding, with the plan to revisit the place they stayed on their honeymoon, the place where they mapped out their future together. Cape Cod is also where he vacationed for many years as a child. The familiar setting stirs memories of his summers there and, particularly, the atrocious parenting (and education about marriage) he received from the cynical academics who were his father and mother. He thought he'd left all that behind, but it seems that his parents have left a larger mark on him that he believed.

This novel is about Griffin and the parenting he received, but mostly it is about marriage. Russo is a master of detail, especially the contours of a relationship. He plays out the daily irritations that grow into bigger things, and he explores the ways that you can know someone so well—every facial expression, every freckle or scar—but not every shadow of the heart (if you need more explanation just listen to “The Stranger” by Billy Joel). He names the perversity that we are all susceptible to--doing exactly the thing that irritates or hurts the one we love most, even as we know we are doing it.

As in Empire Falls, there is much genuine brokenness in this book. And I can't say it's particularly friendly to religion in general. But there is something weirdly satisfying about having familiar, human disappointments and temptations named and described so well, like reading your old diary.

And since he’s very rooted in the places he writes about, his descriptions of the Maine coast and particularly Cape Cod make me eager to get going—without the bad parenting, of course.