That Old Cape Magic

Late middle age is a time of life when everything is predictable and yet somehow you fail to see any of it coming.
So says the main character, Griffin. So true. I thought the book contained alot of painful truisms that are hard to face until you are well into middle age. Things like your parents have toxic elements and they have been slowly leeching healthier impulses out of you for years. And they don't mean to. They love you. It is just a part of the relationship that is inevitable. And while your spouse might have a better relationship with their parents, that one is also inevitably toxic in some way as well. Worse yet, when you inherit not only genes but also bitterness from your parents, it leaves you vulnerable to loss and sadness in ways that you don't even begin to understand for years to come. To truly separate and individuate, which Mahler thought we humans should be able to accomplish by the time we are three years old, in reality takes decades. We can tolerate physical distance from our parents at a young age, but the emotional ties are tenacious and often the only tools we have to cut them with are butter knives. Then amidst all the slow dawning of clarity, sometimes a marriage gets off course. What was a comfortable tissue of lies about one's family gets ripped, sometimes even shredded, and suddenly the marriage you once felt anchored to loses its footing, and leaves you adrift. You lose sight of the things that are important about the relationship, if only momentarily. This is the novel's landscape. It is more unflinching than bleak, but it does not pull any punches. Marriages of long duration take work. Parenting is not for wimps. And while one does not have a choice about being an offspring, that can be the hardest job of all.
This book did not arrive to rave reviews and for a strict Russo fan, this is not like Bridge of Sighs or Empire Falls. Those are "big" books, books that have a whole community in the periscope of the book. In that sort of book, we get to know a whole array of family, friends, neighbors, enemies and co-workers. The warp and the weft of a community are carefully described thread by thread, and then we see how they interweave. This is not that sort of book. This is more of what I would call a "little" book. A book where you see one flawed character slowly and painfully look in the mirror at his life, and piece by piece try to reassemble the puzzle into a new picture. The scope is narrower, but more focused and in depth. I am not sure you can read this in college and really hear what it has to say, but if you could see the truisms in it, you might have an easier go of it over the next 40 years. The even trickier part is how to help our children get over us as parents.