‘That Old Cape Magic’ by Richard Russo

  Jack Griffin’s life seems perfect from the outside. Good career. Nice home. Great family.
  But after giving up screenwriting in Los Angeles for teaching at a New England college, Griffin begins to question his own happiness. His marriage is crumbling, he’s unsatisfied at work and he has been driving around with his father’s ashes in his trunk for nearly a year, unable to let go of his dad.
  The problems in his marriage come to a head when he and his wife travel to Cape Cod for a wedding. The setting brings with it a flood of memories for Griffin, memories of his childhood and of his own parents’ bitter union.
  To make their unhappy circumstances more tolerable, they had affairs and pretended to be deeply wounded when these came to light. His father had been a genuine serial adulterer, whereas his mother simply refused to lag behind in this or anything else. ... Griffin had imagined that he must be the one keeping them together. It was his mother who eventually disabused him of the bizarre notion. ... “Good heavens, no, it wasn’t you. What kept us together was ‘That Old Cape Magic.’ ... One glorious month, each summer,” she explained. “Sun. Sand. Water. Gin. Followed by eleven months of misery. ... But that’s about par for most marriages, I think you’ll find.”
  His mother’s words haunt him as Griffin discovers his own truths about marriage. Always thinking his parents selfish and snobby, he slowly begins to see he’s more like them than he’d like to believe.
  Griffin trudges along in his life, never making any forward momentum. Soon, his mother’s ashes join his father’s in the trunk. More baggage for him to carry.
  Richard Russo’s “That Old Cape Magic” is the story about a man going through a midlife crisis. Russo, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for “Empire Falls,” portrays Griffin as someone so obsessed with assessing his own happiness that he is in jeopardy of losing everything.
  Russo, also known for “Bridge of Sighs,” might not get the same kind of acclaim for “That Old Cape Magic” as he has for his other books, but the novel is a poignant and often funny look at how spending all your energy trying to measure the worth of your own life often can lead to not taking the time to enjoy it.