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That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo
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That Old Cape Magic

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That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo
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Aug 04, 2009 | ISBN 9780739318935 | 548 Minutes

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    Jun 01, 2010 | ISBN 9781400030910

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  • Aug 04, 2009 | ISBN 9780307273307

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  • Aug 04, 2009 | ISBN 9780739318935

    548 Minutes

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Praise

“Marvelous. . . . Utterly charming.” —The Washington Post

“In one of America’s most mythic landscapes, Russo details one man’s shaky first steps out of his past and into self-knowledge with good humor, generosity, and an open heart.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“His most intimate yet: an astute portrait of a 30-year marriage, in all its promise and pain. . . . His honest, heartfelt storytelling—like a cooling breeze off a certain New England shoreline—has never felt fresher.” —People
 
“A fine book about parents and children, about remembering and forgetting, and ultimately what it means to be a grown-up.”  —The San Francisco Chronicle

“When we finish reading That Old Cape Magic, we know we’ll start rereading it soon. And that the characters will come to mind at the most unpredictable times. We will stay on speaking terms with them more than we do with some of our real-life cousins.” —The Miami Herald
 
“Suffused with Russo’s signature comic sensibility, and with insights, by turns tender and tough, about human frailty, forbearance, fortitude, and fervor.” —The Boston Globe
 
“Russo has a great sense of humor, of the absurd, and of the intricate, constantly shifting, complex emotional levels of his characters. . . . The way Russo plumbs their depths are wonderful.  Incidents and episodes charm and sparkle.”  —The Providence Journal

“Does not disappoint. . . . [With] deep connection to place, and affection for the large cast of characters who blunder and struggle through his pages.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“[With] elegant writing. . . . Few novelists exude as much wry compassion as Russo.”  —The Christian Science Monitor
 
“The Pulitzer Prize-winning author has again worked his magic.”  —Chicago Sun-Times
 
“Glistening. . . . [A] chambered nautilus of a novel.”  —Maureen Corrigan, “Fresh Air,” National Public Radio
 
“Good-humored, deeply felt, frankly put. . . . Full of Mr. Russo’s canny dialogue and piquantly funny observations.”  —The Wall Street Journal
 
“Insightful. . . . [With] sharply funny dialogue, a crisp and shapely plot, beguiling settings and likable characters . . . plus a couple of wildly hilarious big scenes.”  —St. Petersburg Times
 
“This is a thinking person’s novel. . . . [Russo’s] prose is thought-provoking and guaranteed to make you examine your relationships with your parents, your spouse and your children.”  —The City Wire
 
“Russo’s deft characterization, wit and sympathetic eye are always welcome.”  —Winnipeg Free Press
 
“Effortlessly emotional . . . so awash in seriously comic and tragic but always brutally honest moments. . . . A beautiful depiction of how people think, how we convince ourselves that we are the center of our universe, and that things don’t just happen but are ‘done,’ often to or for us.”  —Pop Matters
 
“Russo is an apt and sensitive storyteller, and his prose is generously sprinkled with insights into everyday life.”  —Daily Herald
 
“Tender and heartening. . . . Full of humor and pathos. . . . A deeply mature novel that deals with marriage and aging so gracefully.”  —San Antonio Express-News
 
“Russo is a sensitive, intelligent writer. . . . It’s always a pleasure to read his smooth prose and inhabit his characters’ conflicted minds.”  —The San Jose Mercury News
 
“A comic yet thoughtful take on marriage. . . . But amid the humor, it raises questions about the complications we inherit and the ones we build for ourselves.” —USA Today

“A touching portrait of smart people spinning their wheels.” —Chicago Tribune
 
“A recipe for laying ghosts to rest [and] a tale about love requited and unrequited. Finally, it is a big-hearted book about real, complex relationships that are an utterly fascinating mix of the two.” —Bangor Daily News

Author Q&A

Q: Apparently there is a wedding phenomenon you have termed "Table 17". What exactly is that
and how does it relate to this novel?
A:
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 almost 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.

Q: You have said that That Old Cape Magic began as a short story. What was the moment you
knew it was calling out to be a novel?
A:
Griffin, my main character, begins the story on his way to a wedding with his father’s urn in the trunk of his car. I planned for him to scatter the ashes (his past), put 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 shits 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 story, but if you allow a shitting seagull into it, you’ve suddenly moved on to something much larger.

Q: Why did you choose the Cape?
A:
For some time I’ve been fascinated with the idea 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 believe 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 think you’ll one day be able to swing if things go well. Except that even when they go well, you discover it’s still unaffordable, which gives the desired place a magical quality. The faster you run toward it, the faster it runs away from you. I chose the Cape because it’s always 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 always been just beyond their reach. One of their many dubious genetic gifts to Griffin is a sense that happiness is always on the horizon, never where you’re standing. Very American, I think.

Q: That Old Cape Magic is book ended by two weddings and becomes the story 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 other events? Or, in other words, what were you up to in framing your story with two weddings?
A:
It probably won’t surprise readers to discover 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 easier on my wife and me. Living in the states, how much could we really be blamed for things that went wrong so far from home? Our other 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 other and living on opposite sides of the country (not to mention the political spectrum), might be fissionable. Mostly we feared for the family of the groom, and maybe even the town, since we hoped to continue living there.

In the second wedding of That Old 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. Planning your children’s weddings also gets you thinking back to your own and making 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, actually jumping onto the moving train. They’d given our sleeper to someone 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 badly we couldn’t touch each other for the rest of the trip. But we were young and the tacos were good 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 Old Cape Magic opens.

Q: Griffin’s parents, both academics trapped in what they call the "mid f***ing west," are such wonderful, sometimes maddening, often hilarious, always surprising characters. You’ve mined the satiric potential of academia before, most notably in Stra ight Man. Have you been longing to go back there?
A:
I thought I’d got all the academic satire out of my system with Straight Man, but apparently not. Actually, since writing that novel I’ve entered another world–movie making–that would be equally idiotic except that instead of academic scrip it involves real money. In this novel, because Griffin’s a former screenwriter, I got to compare lunacies. It wasn’t a fair fight, of course. Academics are really the only ones in their weight class (heavy).

Q: At the start of the novel Griffin is a man in his mid fifties who seemingly has everything going for him, a great marriage, a great 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 amazing how quickly that can happen, no?
A:
That’s the other similarity between this book and Straight Man. In both novels we watch men who are tenured in life. Safe, in other words. But there’s just this one little 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 happen? The answer to that question, in this instance, is That Old Cape Magic.

Q: Have you actually ever been to a wedding where a guest was trapped in a tree?
A:
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.

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