New fiction: The (old) boys of summer

That Old Cape Magic

by Richard Russo

(Knopf, $25.95)

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Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo “can be a clown when he wants to,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. After two grand epics about post-industrial small-town America, the author of Empire Falls has produced “a dyspeptic romantic comedy” that “catches the bittersweet humor” of an Everyman realizing, to his horror, that he is beginning to act like his parents. Since one of Jack Griffin’s “hilariously acerbic parents” is already an urnful of ashes in his car trunk when the book opens, it’s “a sign of Russo’s comic genius” that the older Griffins “just about steal the show.” One of their signal flaws, said Dan Scheraga in the Associated Press, is that they deluded themselves into thinking that happiness is a place to be visited; the two state university professors hated everything about life except their annual vacation on Cape Cod. Russo makes all the action “eminently filmable,” sometimes distractingly so, said Heller McAlpin in the Los Angeles Times. But look past all the “snappy dialogue” and physical comedy and you’ll find an insightful tale about a man who hits his mid-50s before he is finally “forced to come to terms with the whole notion of family.”

Inherent Vice

by Thomas Pynchon

(Penguin, $27.95)

For a man in his 70s, Thomas Pynchon is “wonderfully adolescent,” said Aravind Adiga in the London Times. Twelve years into a late-career resurgence, the author of Gravity’s Rainbow has produced a hippie-era detective story that still finds him inventing dopey names for his characters and raging against the federal government, the police, and California’s then-governor, Ronald Reagan. Pynchon’s “most reader-friendly” book yet introduces us to pot-smoking L.A. private eye Doc Sportello, then hands Doc a minor missing-persons case that leads him into a vast but relatively decipherable conspiracy. It wasn’t decipherable enough for me, said Sam Anderson in New York. Though the book opens amiably enough, the plot got so willfully busy that by the end “I had no idea what was happening or even who was speaking.” Just keep your eyes on Doc, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. One benefit of Pynchon’s choice to write a detective novel is that the genre forces him to create a likable central character. If parts of the conspiracy that Doc uncovers don’t cohere, a reader can set them aside as “pot-induced fantasizing.” And our mellow hero eventually attains a level of wisdom that might even be called mature.

Rhino Ranch

by Larry McMurtry

(Simon & Schuster, $25)

The latest from Larry McMurtry is “a near-perfect coda” to a five-novel set that began with 1966’s The Last Picture Show, said Mike Shea in Texas Monthly. In that book, Duane Moore was a high school senior in tiny Thalia, Texas. Here, after retirement, a heart attack, and desertion by his second wife, he drifts home to that “mean, miserable little oil-patch town,” and his innate good nature moves him toward an acceptance “that joy is transient, but so is ­sorrow.” McMurtry, the greatest of Texas’ novelists, has indicated that this “droll and poignant dramedy” might be the last novel he writes. At the least, it’s another chance to appreciate McMurtry’s women—“strong gals with strong appetites, earthy humor, fierce opinions, and a healthy skepticism about the failings” of men like Duane, said James Srodes in The Washington Times. “There’s a certain languor” about McMurtry’s prose that indicates he may be as weary as Duane, said William Porter in The Denver Post. But, as indicated by his interest in the town’s new rhino nature preserve and the billionaire who founds it, Duane “retains his capacity for whimsy and wonder.” So too does McMurtry.

South of Broad

by Pat Conroy

(Nan A. Talese, $29.95)

Pat Conroy could never be accused of tasteful restraint, said Tina Jordan in Entertainment Weekly. Anyone who loved 1986’s The Prince of Tides knows that the “lavishly purpled prose” of the sensitive and troubled male narrator was integral to that book’s Southern-style charm. Unfortunately, Conroy’s first novel in 14 years is “weighed down” by the same type of floridity that made Tides soar. His new Charleston, S.C., tableau feels as fresh as that city “on an oppressively humid day.” While a “turgid melodrama” generally hurts nobody, said Louisa Thomas in Newsweek, this one wants readers to mistake “incessant catharsis for something beneficial.” The book’s hero, Leo, and the high school classmates he reunites with years later “won’t stop picking at half-healed wounds.” They’re “self-indulgent and ultimately unlikable.” For many Conroy fans, South of Broad nevertheless “will feel like a family reunion,” said Gina Webb in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “The gang’s all here,” from the suicidal brother to the orphaned mountain siblings to the author himself—an artist “in full possession of his strengths and flaws” delivering yet another “bravura” attempt to “resurrect his old demons” and “save the characters menaced by them.”