Too-Small Moments: Richard Russo's That Old Cape Magic needs room to breathe

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Too-Small Moments: Richard Russo's That Old Cape Magic needs room to breathe

POSTED: Thursday, August 20, 2009, 5:05 PM

Filed Under: Arts Books

Knopf, 264 pp., $25.95, Aug. 4

Richard Russo has always had a knack for capturing the small moments of character and nuance that make people ' even fictional ones ' who they are: It's hard to tell someone what Nobody's Fool is about, for instance, but you leave that book ' reluctantly ' knowing and loving every one of the flawed people in its pages. In Empire Falls, Russo strayed just a little from his best talent, getting mired in current events, but even then, his characters didn't suffer for it; 2007's Bridge of Sighs felt like pure Russo, a character fest, but with an overarching feeling that this was a writer who was starting to worry about getting old.

Russo's previous novels have all come several years apart and been meaty, 500-pagers ' lots of room and time to expound and explore; perhaps it is That Old Cape Magic's brevity that is its problem. Whatever it is, it's not a hell of a lot of fun to read. In his seventh novel, Russo has strayed far from what he does most delightfully. There are glimpses of it, sure, but what Russo has created here, what he alludes to in the acknowledgments, is a meditation on growing older and dreading dying. Which would be just fine if he did it through a protagonist who wasn't a total jerk, or at least one with a more interesting story. Jack Griffin is a garden-variety dick going through a very ordinary midlife crisis, which is caused/exacerbated by his father's death, and then, a year later, his mother's. His daughter's wedding and his separation from his wife are thrown in, along with memories of vacationing on the Cape with his cartoonishly snobbish, horrible parents, but it never really comes together, just as we never get any real sense of his and his wife's troubles, what leads them to split. These are not full, Russo characters, and it's not terribly difficult to say goodbye. It's not that there aren't moments of loveliness in the telling; there are, but you leave this book wishing they'd had more time to breathe.

'Nancy Armstrong

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