Assisted Living or Assisted Suicide?

The adage “old age is not for sissies” was emblazoned, as I recall reading somewhere, on a needlepoint cushion in the possession of the actress Bette Davis. Certainly there existed no better poster girl for the depredations of chronology, both mental and physical, than Bette Davis in her later years. As part of a boomer cohort now gazing warily into the rheumy eye of codgerdom, I come increasingly to regard the subject of aging with bemusement and a kind of clammy fascination. So let us consider certain denizens of the Idyll Inn, a “retirement lodge” in a smallish urban centre and the focal point of Joan Barfoot’s new novel, Exit Lines. The Idyll Inn is “a two-storey Petri dish of adjustments among the lame, the halt, the partly deaf, the half-blind, the liver-damaged, ovary-missing, joint-stiffened, determined veterans of decades of breathing: quite a crew. Every sag and wrinkle in the place a medal for some kind of valour.” Specifically, our attention is directed to four such valorous inhabitants.

Sylvia is the lawyer’s widow, social doyenne and fixture of the local charity luncheon circuit and a dab hand at the waspish comment. George is the former owner and chief salesman of the town’s shoe store, the victim of a stroke and confined to a wheelchair; George’s wife, Alice, has Alzheimer’s and is in a nursing home. Sylvia has come to the Idyll Inn on her own steam, whereas George enters reluctantly, at the behest of a married daughter who lives out of town. There is widowed Greta, a large woman of essentially placid disposition, whose daughters have arranged for and are subsidizing her stay. Unlike George, Greta is grateful for the filial largesse. Then there is Ruth, at 74 the “baby” of the quartet. Ruth is the child of escapees from the Holocaust, a former Children’s Aid worker and another widow. She is also the linchpin of the narrative. “Luxuriously, thoroughly loved” by her late husband, Ruth has lost the desire to go on living. She wants to die. But she will need some help and presently she will know to whom to turn.

Barfoot’s Critical Injuries was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and Luck, her most recent offering before Exit Lines, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. In her settings and concerns, she has been compared to Carol Shields and Anne Tyler. Her tone is cool and appraising, often mordantly funny. The cover line for my paperback copy of Luck describes “a dark, witty novel about life, love, death and happiness.” The cover line for my hardcover copy of Exit Lines describes “a darkly comic novel about everything that matters from sex to death.” Two thoughts occur. Cover lines on hardback novels are not very elegant. (The cover itself does Barfoot no favours; it is all ugly graphics and clashing fonts.) And should we not think about imposing a moratorium on “darkly comic”? Alarm bells go off now when I see that phrase. It suggests no one quite knows what to make of the material at hand.

Indeed, what are we to make of Exit Lines? Sylvia, George, Greta and Ruth must try to preserve their dignity even as their bodies and an outside world alternately indifferent and condescending conspire against them. A “retirement lodge”—the unctuously euphemistic term sets Sylvia’s teeth on edge—is not the unlikeliest area in which to discover dark comedy. The ingredients are there. But Barfoot tries too hard. The first chapter places the reader at—as we soon learn—some time in the future. Strange and stealthy doings are afoot and “while those abroad tonight in the Idyll Inn may find their moods swinging between severely apprehensive and hopeful, there remains potential for a kind of slapstick comedy.” Wryness comes off as special pleading.

From the start, then, the tone is iffy. As are the headings of the many brief chapters, all of them followed by ellipses … a metaphor perhaps for the warping effect time can play on the mental processes of the elderly, and yet somehow gimmicky. The recurrence of flash forwards to this stealth operation in progress is intended to invite—what? If anything the foreshadowing begins to evoke irritation more than suspense. Early on we know what Ruth is about and early on we sense how she means to go about it. Even the surprises at the conclusion are somehow predictable. And Barfoot, who is usually sure-footed at resisting sentimentality, comes close at times to allowing her characters to become old dears.

Since the setting is a small city, and more particularly since this is a novel, it is not surprising that the paths of the principals should at times have intersected. Waspish Sylvia used to shop at George’s shoe store and once had an affair with the father of the sourish middle-aged woman who now manages the Idyll Inn. George had been the lover of the widowed Greta who, for a time, worked as an employee at his store. It can make for a diverting tangle. Too often, however, the poignant or comic detail is steamrollered by Barfoot’s insistent structure. Understandably, when Ruth asks her three new acquaintances to assist in her suicide, the request is greeted with more than a little shock and astonishment. “What do they believe? What are their values, and if any, their faiths? … What is compassion, how important is that?” Legitimate questions that would naturally arise in such an awkward situation. But who precisely is asking these questions? And, stated here so baldly, they reveal the novel’s chief weakness: the tendency of an authorial voice, which has managed to juggle confidently the varying points of view of different characters, to ultimately subsume those individual voices and thus diminish their impact.

As I was reading Exit Lines I remembered Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori, which covered similar demographic terrain. Maybe—unfairly—I hoped for Spark’s astringency. Memento Mori is early Spark so the misanthropy had not become as cruelly distilled as in the later works, but even there, where authorial detachment is supreme, her characters—or more precisely their predicaments—engage us in a way the people here do not. Barfoot, who quite evidently likes her characters, sets up the situation, but the wild and woolly and mysterious human connections that might fully animate the darkness of this very human comedy lapse in and out of focus and disbelief cannot forever be kept at bay.

In Luck, in a period covering several days, Barfoot managed wonderfully to interweave the characters of three women reacting to the death of a man central to their lives. Nora, the artist, had been married to him. Sophie, the helper, had had an ongoing dalliance with him. Beth, the artist’s model and former teen beauty pageant winner, if more or less tangential to his life, has become fixated on his widow. That book had an amplitude about it that played to Barfoot’s strengths. (And if you want dark comedy, observe how she suddenly and slyly explains how Beth does away with her overbearing mommy.) In a coda, set a year later, Nora is last seen taking a taxi home from an art gallery displaying her latest show of work. “Which makes the exhilarating, terrifying, luxurious, thrilling, glad-to-be-alive, diving-into-darkness question, as Nora leans back while the taxi makes its way through the city’s wide streets of neon and light, what it always is. Again, and again, and again, it has to be, Now what?” Her admirers will no doubt be asking the same question about the next Barfoot novel and awaiting an answer with pleasurable anticipation.