Richard Russo is, in my opinion, the most talented living American novelist. That Old Cape Magic, however, is one of his least popular novels. Russo is unique in the twenty-first-century American literature in that he writes about the working class. Readers love him for it because nobody else is doing it. That Old Cape Magic is different, though, and I think many readers felt cheated that he’d suddenly publish a book about stuffy college professors who pay for luxury weddings at Cape Cod while bickering about their boring personal lives.

In spite of this change in focus, though, the novel is priceless. The professors are deliciously dysfunctional and their contempt for a lot less dysfunctional Republicans and / or people without graduate degrees is hilarious. I’d also say that this is the deepest of Russo’s novels. It’s about permanence versus fluidity, and what both really mean. It’s about how impossible it is to escape from what our childhood made us be. Funny, sad, and completely absorbing, this is the kind of book that makes me pretend I have something urgent to do and instead sit in the car and read myself into oblivion.

This is true talent, my friends. Russo takes a topic as overdone as a college professor’s belated midlife crisis, and turns it into a gem. A wonderful, wonderful writer.

Everything by Russo is good except for Chances Are… That one was quite disappointing. I highly recommend his memoir Elsewhere because it’s eye-opening.

Today we went to see Clifford The Big Red Dog, a movie based on books for little kids. I detest the books because they are very primitive. But the movie was great. In it, a group of immigrants gets together to defend the right of a child in New York to have a normal childhood at a time when the state apparatus in alliance with an evil biomedical corporation conducts scary experiments under the guise of caring about safety and climate but in reality motivated solely by profit. The lesson the movie teaches children: ‘safety’ isn’t the most important thing in the world, and don’t be afraid to break rules because they are likely to be stupid anyway.