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Russo's latest sends love's arrow right on target

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By ROGER K. MILLER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 27, 2009

"That Old Cape Magic," by Richard Russo (Knopf, $25.95)

As an author, Richard Russo is in love with love. To a greater or lesser extent (usually greater), it is a theme in his six earlier novels and book of short stories, especially in the immediately previous "Bridge of Sighs," where everyone's fate is shaped by love, the warping of it, or the lack or withholding of it.

So it is in "That Old Cape Magic." Jack Griffin, the central character, thinks, "Only love related one thing to all other things."

The title is a variation on the song "That Old Black Magic," which his parents would sing when they arrived on Cape Cod for their annual vacation. Jack's parents are, or were, self-satisfied, self-absorbed English professors, inwardly (when not outwardly) smirking at the barbarous greater world of people who had done no graduate research.

Though both parents are dead (the novel is set in the present), they remain part of Jack's life or, at least, thoughts. He drives around with first his father's, and then both parents', ashes in the trunk of his car, unable to decide where on their beloved cape to dump them.

Indeed, incidents and scenes in Jack's life replicate, or morph into, similar scenes from his parents' lives, like flashbacks overlapping current existence. This troubles Jack, because he definitely does not want to be like his parents.

Jack, a former screenwriter turned college professor (of screenwriting), and Joy have been married for 30 years. At the center of the novel are two weddings a year apart, the first of their daughter Laura's friend Kelsey on Cape Cod, and then Laura's on the coast of Maine. In that year Jack and Joy's common life changes drastically.

Comes time for Laura's wedding, each shows up with a different companion. The day before and the day of the wedding are a minimasterpiece of seriocomic disaster. Few are as adept as Russo at creating farce out of everyday life, at putting convincing comic speech into the mouths of dull characters.

Russo is also adept at the Not Entirely Unhappy Ending. Questions remain, as questions do in most good literature. Will Laura and her new husband continue the eternal recurrence of becoming their parents and not realizing it? Could it happen, as Jack mused earlier, "that in thirty years, love's urgency, if not love itself, might have dissipated"?

I believe I have read every word of fiction Russo has published. None of it has disappointed. The ending here may stray more than in the others toward Hollywood Cute and Satisfying (Russo is, after all, also a screenwriter), but it also does not stray far from honest and believable. As for readable, it is, as always, right on target.

Roger K. Miller is a novelist and freelance writer, reviewer and editor.

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