THAT OLD CAPE MAGIC, by Richard Russo. Knopf; 292 pages; $25.95. WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Once, Jack Griffin was a screenwriter. Two of the movies made from his scripts were good, but he was sliding down the hill of made-for-television when he threw up his hands and became an English professor at a good liberal-arts school, which made his wife very happy. But now, Jack is in trouble. Not in any large way, but in equally dangerous, subterranean ways. Mainly, he's spending a lot of time thinking about his childhood and youth. And he's been carrying his father's ashes in the trunk of his car for eight months but can't seem to decide what he wants to do with them. Other than that, he's just fine. Richard Russo's 'That Old Cape Magic' signals with its title that this is to be a gentle novel set in a place generally felt to have some magical restorative qualities. The action of the book takes place over a year, bookended by two weddings -- one for a family friend, the other for Jack's daughter. Jack is another one of Russo's lovable, past-their-prime slackers. He means well, wants to be a good husband and a good father and, for the most part, has been. But he's at a dangerous age -- for men of a certain personality type, every age is the dangerous age. 'Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming.' When he finds out that his wife was once in love with his writing partner back in Hollywood, Jack spins out. Nothing happened beyond a few longing looks, but that doesn't matter to Jack. It's less of a crisis, more of an excuse to see if he can retrace his steps and discover the guy he used to be. Can he be young again? Jack is a little bit like Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe -- ruminative, benign, aware that he's surfing the ridge of a potentially disastrous wave, but unsure about how to end the ride. The novel's edge is provided by Jack's mother, a horrifyingly bitter and often hilarious retired academic who could curdle milk just by looking at it. She's an utter, complete and unapologetic bitch, currently in her third assisted-living facility and lashing out at anyone who dares to hand her anything as declasse as an Agatha Christie paperback. The reflexive nastiness and disdain that emanated from his parents and permeated his childhood is what Jack has spent his life running away from. 'They exhibited the professional humanists utter cluelessness where money was concerned. They bought on impulse, often things that required assembly, saying how hard can it be, then finding out. Bookshelves invariably had at least one shelf where the unfinished side faced up, it's rough edge facing out.... They gravitated to failed technologies like eight-track tapes and beta recorders. ...' There isn't a lot of tension in the novel, because we sense that things will turn out all right, or at least as much as they do in life, which is to say people usually muddle through. Richard Russo has written a short but select group of novels ('Mohawk,' 'Nobody's Fool,' 'Straight Man,' 'Empire Falls') about down-at-the-mouth characters who have a certain residual emotional resilience. It doesn't seem enough for them -- they'd rather be jaunty than resilient -- but it will have to do. Jack has a higher socio-economic status than most of Russo's characters, but otherwise he falls in line with Russo's specialty, even when Russo persists in nudging the proceedings toward the farce that was one of 'Straight Man's' least successful inventions. What Russo does as well as any writer alive is empathy. Despite the fact that there's nothing much at risk in 'That Old Cape Magic,' you can't help liking Russo's people, and liking the novel that contains them. Scott Eyman writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: scott(underscore)eyman@pbpost.com. 