Book Review: That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo

You could dismiss Newsweek’s recent screed on this novelist — Jennie Yabroff’s "Is Richard Russo a Misogynist?” — as just another unintentionally funny example of the reduction of all journalistic accounts to edgy sound bites. That is, if it wasn’t so wrong-headed. Of course, Newsweek has never had the literary luster of its rival Time (whose roster, over the years, has included James Agee, Stephen Vincent Benet, Archibald MacLeish, John Hersey, John O'Hara, Weldon Kees and Frank Norris), but even Newsweek’s solidly middlebrow tradition is tarnished by this sad example of how print media is “reinventing itself” in a web-driven world.

Only a monomaniacal misandrist could identify misogyny as a key thrust of Russo’s new novel That Old Cape Magic. The protagonist Jack Griffin is beset by self-loathing, accentuated by his tendency to let down the decent, kind-hearted women in his life. His friend Tommy pointedly asks where he finds these fine ladies and reminds him of how unworthy he is of them. The men are the real troublemakers here — even Tommy, who is perhaps a little too interested in the women in his buddy’s life.

Griffin is caught up in a mid-life crisis. He wants to abandon his secure job as a college professor and write screenplays on the West Coast. He wants his marriage to succeed, but also wants out of it. His parents are dead, but he agonizes over their ashes, sitting in the trunk of his car destined for some final resting spot that he can’t find the gumption to choose. He has additional baggage from childhood that is much heavier than these urns of ash, and it weighs him down even further. But a woman-hater he is not.

Ah, but parents . . . that’s another story entirely.

If I had to pick the single most prevalent theme in fiction today it would probably be bad parenting. Check out (to cite just a few examples of an almost universal them) Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth — or, honestly, just pick a novel at random from the “new fiction” shelf at your local bookstore . . . and you will find example after example of just how bad mom and dad can be. There is a lesson here, surely, but not one that they teach in creative writing classes.

Article Author: Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia is a writer and musician. He is the author of Delta Blues, The History of Jazz and, most recently, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool. You can follow Ted Gioia on Twitter at www.twitter.com/tedgioia.

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