The only other Richard Russo book I have read is Empire Falls-a rather depressing bit of business where the bad guys go unpunished and the hero is a total wanker. But it was still a good read.
That Old Cape Magic is also set in the Northeast with a few references to the mid-fucking-west. The heart of the story is about summers spent on Cape Cod and time spent in Maine. It’s about a son who hates his mom and dad and how they hate him. It’s a story of adultery, betrayal, and one man’s failure in all the parts of his life that matter.
For all the bad things that happen to our hero, including his carrying around his father’s ashes in the trunk of his car for over a year, That Old Cape Magic is a fun book. There are plenty of laugh out loud moments and plenty of pause and think for a minute moments.
Among the problems are the countless flashbacks, flashforwards, and flashsideways that left me lost from time to time as to when, where, and why I was in this story. For part of the book his dead mother’s ghost continues to nag our hero and gets him into trouble of one sort or another.
The writing is solid, but the occasional flights of fancy make the story a hard one to make much sense of. The addition of such things as signs that can’t quite be read when sober and twins that can’t quite to be told apart are both fun and pointless. In the end, we are left with our hero’s fate still undecided. It seems that our screenwriting main character gets a chance to change in the 3rd act after all.
The audio book is read by Arthur Morey-whom the back cover says has starred on Broadway, but his main work seems to be as an audio book reader. He’s got just enough of an Alan Alda accent here that I have to wonder if this is his normal reading voice, or if he was channeling Hawkeye Peirce for the Maine dialect-if Hawkeye’s accent was a Maine dialect.
The book was funny and occasionally touching. The middle aged man pondering the meaning of his life and thinking about a long ago summer inspired similar feelings in myself. I like a book that makes me think a little, even if it is only about myself.
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