That Old Cape Magic: A Novel

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• ISBN13: 9781400030910
• Condition: New
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Product Description
For Griffin, all paths, all memories, converge at Cape Cod.  The Cape is where he took his childhood summer vacations, where he and his wife, Joy, honeymooned, where they chose he’d place his LA screenwriting job to become a college professor, and where they celebrated the marriage of their daughter Laura’s best friend. But when their beloved Laura’s wedding takes place a year later, Griffin is caught between chauffeuring his mother’s and father’s ashes in two urns and contending with Joy and her large, unruly family tree. Both he and she have also brought dates along. How in the world could this have happened?
 
By turns hilarious, rueful, and uplifting, That Ancient Cape Magic is a very much involving novel about marriage, family tree, and all the additional ties that bind.Amazon.com Review
Book Description
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 tale of a marriage, and of all the additional 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’ relief from the despised Midwest. And the Cape is where he and Joy honeymooned, in the course of which they drafted the Fantastic Truro Accord, a plot for their lives together that’s now thirty years ancient and has largely come right. He’d left screenwriting and Los Angeles behind for the sort of New England college his snobby literary parents had permanently aspired to in vain; they’d stirred into an ancient house full of character; and they’d ongoing a family tree. 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 painstakingly swamped the present that the future suddenly hangs in the balance. And when, a year later, a far more vital 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 tree, and both he and she have brought dates along. How in the world could this have happened?

That Ancient Cape Magic is a novel of deep introspection and every family tree 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 fantastic 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.

Question: Rumor has it that there is a wedding phenomenon you have termed “Table 17.” What exactly is that and how does it tell to this novel?

Richard Russo: A few years ago my wife and I were invited to a wedding and were seated at what was clearly a “leftover” table. It reminded me of the final teams who get into the NCAA tournament. You can tell by their seeding that they were the last ones in, that they nearly didn’t make the grade. Table 17 works thematically in the novel because being among strangers, not sure whether you belong, may be the main character’s future if he can’t find a way to slow his downward spiral.

Question: You have said that That Ancient Cape Magic started as a fleeting tale. What was the moment you knew it was calling out to be a novel?

Richard Russo: Griffin, my main character, starts the tale on his way to a wedding with his father’s urn in the trunk of his car. I plotted for him to scatter the ashes (his past), place his future in danger at the wedding (his present) and then pull back from disaster at the last moment. But then he pulled over to the side of the road in his convertible to take a phone call from his mother, at the end of which a seagull sh**s on him. At that moment, in part because Griffin blames her, he and I both had a sinking feeling. You can resolve thematic issues of past, present and future in a twenty page tale, but if you allow a sh**ting seagull into it, you’ve suddenly stirred on to something much larger.

Question: Why did you choose the Cape?

Richard Russo: For some time I’ve been fascinated with the thought of “a finer place” (see Lucy Lynch and Bobby Marconi in Bridge of Sighs). I’m talking about both fiction and real life. Why do people judge that happiness is more likely to find you in one place than another? It has something with what you can and can’t afford, what you reflect you’ll one day be able to swing if things go well. Except that even when they go well, you learn it’s still unaffordable, which gives the desired place a magical quality. The quicker you run toward it, the quicker it runs away from you. I chose the Cape because it’s permanently been expensive and just keeps getting more so, but it could have been any number of similar places. For Griffin’s parents, two academics, a house on the Cape would have permanently been just beyond their reach. One of their many dubious genetic gifts to Griffin is a sense that happiness is permanently on the horizon, never where you’re standing. Very American, I reflect.

Question: That Ancient Cape Magic is book finished by two weddings and becomes the tale of Griffin’s own marriage as well as that of his parents and the impending one of his daughter. Is there some loaded charge to weddings that unleashes the past and threatens the future in a way unlike additional events? Or, in additional words, what were you up to in framing your tale with two weddings?

Richard Russo: It probably won’t surprise readers to learn that both my daughters were married during the time I was writing this book, which, if it does well, will pay for their weddings. One of our girls was married in London, which except for the expense made things simpler on my wife and me. Living in the states, how much could we really be blamed for things that went incorrect so far from home? Our additional daughter was married in the coastal Maine town where we live, and her wedding was therefore larger. My wife and I feared that our families, who were largely unknown to each additional and living on opposite sides of the country (not to mention the political spectrum), might be fissionable. Mostly we feared for the family tree of the groom, and maybe even the town, since we hoped to continue living there. In the second wedding of That Ancient Cape Magic I imagined an absolutely catastrophic wedding in hopes it might act as a talisman against real-life disaster, which it appears to have done.

Preparation your children’s weddings also gets you thinking back to your own and building the inevitable comparisons. My wife and I were grad-student poor when we got married in Tucson, and our parents were only marginally better off. Our honeymoon was four days in Mexico. We’d booked the sleeper car but managed to arrive late, really jumping onto the moving train. They’d agreed our sleeper to a name else and we had to sit in the aisles on our luggage for several hours until seats became available. Neither of us got a wink of sleep and, naturally, when we arrived in Mazatlan early the next morning, our room wasn’t ready. We changed into bathing suits, went to the beach and immediately fell asleep under the brutal tropical sun. By the time we woke up we were burned so terribly we couldn’t touch each additional for the rest of the trip. But we were young and the tacos were excellent and so was the tequila and we’d brought plenty of books and we talked about our future and who we’d be in that future, and pretty damn quick it was thirty-five years later. That’s just about how long the Griffins have been married when That Ancient Cape Magic opens.

Question: Griffin’s parents, both academics trapped in what they call the “mid f***ing west,” are such wonderful, sometimes exasperating, regularly hilarious, permanently surprising characters. You’ve mined the satiric potential of academia before, most notably in Straight Man. Have you been longing to go back there?

Richard Russo: I thought I’d got all the literary satire out of my system with Straight Man, but rumor has it that not. Really, since writing that novel I’ve entered another world—movie building—that would be equally idiotic except that as a replacement for of literary scrip it involves real money. In this novel, because Griffin’s a ex- screenwriter, I got to compare lunacies. It wasn’t a honest fight, of course. Academics are really the only ones in their weight class (heavy).

Question: At the start of the novel Griffin is a man in his mid fifties who seemingly has everything going for him, a fantastic marriage, a fantastic daughter, the career he aspired to, basically everything he had on his wish list when first venturing out in adulthood. Then, within a year, he watches it all come unglued. It’s incredible how quickly that can take place, no?

Richard Russo: That’s the additional similarity between this book and Straight Man. In both novels we watch men who are tenured in life. Safe, in additional words. But there’s just this one small thread on the sweater. You know you should clip it, not pull it, but there are no scissors at hand and what’s the worst that can take place? The answer to that question, in this instance, is That Ancient Cape Magic.

Question: Have you really ever been to a wedding where a guest was trapped in a tree?

Richard Russo: I myself have never been to a wedding where a guest got stuck in a tree, but we’re attending a wedding on the Cape this summer and I have high hopes.

(Photo © Elena Seibert)

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