That Old Cape Magic
By Richard Russo. (Random House, $25.95.) Russo reads at the Scranton Library, 801 Boston Post Rd., Madison, 7 p.m., Aug. 10. $10. Sponsored by R.J. Julia Booksellers.

At first glance, Richard Russo's new novel, That Old Cape Magic, hints at a change of pace. It's shorter than the average Russo, and its title and jaunty seaside cover art fairly trumpet "beach read." As does the plot. Writing professor Griffin sets off for his traditional end-of-academic-year weekend on Cape Cod with a straightforward to-do list: grade his students' papers, make nice with his wife, keep his mother at arms' length, scatter his father's ashes and accompany his daughter Laura to a wedding. Simple.

Naturally, it's all downhill from there. Griffin is the man who has everything but doesn't realize how easy it is to lose it all. His wife travels separately, for reasons that become unhappily clear; his mother won't stop calling and the ashes remain unscattered. The only bright spots in the weekend are his daughter's engagement, and a call from his old agent in Hollywood beckoning him back to the screenwriting life. Attention must be paid: "Suddenly it was as if his dead parent, his living one, his old profession and his boyhood self were all clamoring for attention."

The narrative then leaps ahead a year. Griffin and his wife (ironically named Joy) arrive separately at Laura's wedding, each with new partners, and Griffin now has two urns of parental ashes to dispose of. In flashback, we become privy to what turns out to have been a hellish year. Paradise Lost, in other words, although thankfully the modern version demands a more upbeat ending. Griffin's unexpected fall and rise becomes a surprising meditation on the grip that parents can hold on us well beyond childhood.

His parents haunt the novel (and Griffin) like disgruntled poltergeists. Sharp-tongued, snobbish, unhappy, their well-polished family jokes adorn the text — the best being the dismissive binary approach to real estate on the Cape: Can't Afford It/Wouldn't Have it as a Gift. Their son believes he has escaped them by landing a decent academic job, a happy marriage and proximity to their beloved Cape Cod. He's slow to realize how thoroughly he has inherited their patronizing, judgmental ways.

An occasional screenwriter, Russo plays with different storytelling techniques, digressing into screenplay at a crucial point, with Griffin ruminating on how the movie version of his life would go. He's also endlessly at work on a short story, based on one of many unhappy childhood holidays on the Cape with his parents; revising the story in the light of new information is a revelatory experience. The biggest question, of course, is will he recapture Joy?

Almost by way of a disclaimer, Russo has Griffin observe, early in the book, that "a false note at the beginning [of a screenplay] was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation." Funnily enough, the false note in the book arrives towards the end, when a string of frankly preposterous accidents occur on the eve of Laura's wedding. Characters are tossed around violently, yet bounce back cartoonishly from their injuries (Q: Were stunt doubles used for the scene with the wheelchair and the yew hedge?).

Presumably the physical humiliation serves to alert our hero that his major wounds are on the inside, but the comedy here is so broad as to be pancake-flat — or movie-ready. Secondary characters, too, seem to have been procured from central casting. The bickering academic parents are Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton redux, a pair of chortling Liverpool lesbians are straight from the Richard Curtis playbook, and a buttoned-up, lovelorn young Korean-American is Harold sans Kumar. Griffin's not the only one feeling "out of plumb." However entertaining the action, the reader misses the author's usual subtlety.

Still, That Old Cape Magic delivers as an entertaining summery read, with a touch of sandy grit. Griffin, like the mythical beast whose name he bears, is a hybrid creature, combining his mother's sharp gainsaying tongue and his father's distracted avoidance. But that's just his surname; he also has a first name — Jack. To begin with, Griffin doesn't know Jack. But he can learn, before it's too late. The novel succeeds as a funny, forgiving profile of a man crawling his way towards self-knowledge just in time to make things right. Viz: That old Russo magic.