Exit Lines (novel)
Author: Joan Barfoot
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Depending on whether we’re staff or family or actually living in one of the cosy apartments, we tell ourselves different stories about life in a retirement residence. Age and health may change our point of view, but the stories come from what our lives have made us and how we intend to go on.
The four central characters in this perceptive novel become somewhat unlikely friends shortly after moving into Idyll Inn, a new assisted-living retirement residence in a small city. Three are women, each with different health issues; the man is in a wheelchair coping with the results of a stroke. But health setbacks are only part of what brings the four together as they pursue their independence in a comparatively structured environment. Decent wine, wry humour and a tendency to resist staff authority help too. (Joan Barfoot has a nice instinct for residence culture that is both funny and telling.)
Billed as “a darkly comic novel about everything that matters, from sex to death,” this refreshingly frank book is more about life than death, although its plot revolves around finding a dignified way to exit.
Barfoot, one of Canada’s top novelists, is comfortable with ambiguity, with shifting emotions and beliefs. Her characters, having thoroughly changed their lives with their move to a residential community, are sorting through their past, longing for support from their offspring. They’re coming to accept that yearning for a show of love won’t bring it. They have to make their own way.
But the four also find they are braver than they thought. The unexpected demands of friendship may help them make better use of the time they have left. Exit Lines is not exactly a happy-ending book, but it is encouraging in its own honest way – and a precious glimpse of what our elders don’t always trust us enough to tell us.
About Muriel Duncan
