In Exit Lines, Joan Barfoot applies her genius for dark comedy to that darkest stage of the human drama: old age, debility, and death.
The lives of four people in a small Canadian city intersect (though not in every case for the first time) when they move into the Idyll Inn, a newly opened retirement home.
Behind them lie the usual patterns of love and betrayal that make up a life. Ahead of them they face diminishment, that dwindling into invisibility of the old who are no longer recognized as fully human.
But fully human these four are, as Barfoot deftly reveals.
There is Sylvia, sharp of mind and tongue, a lawyer’s widow and former luminary of the town’s country club and charity boards. There is Greta, who emigrated from Germany to Canada as a young bride and was left an impoverished widow with three young daughters when her husband was killed in a farm accident.
There is George, for many years owner of the downtown shoe store until driven out of business by cheap goods sold in suburban malls. And there is Ruth, who pursued a career as a children’s aid worker after she reluctantly moved back to town to care for aging parents, a couple who fled Europe to escape the Holocaust but whose reserves of courage ran out.
Constrained to various degrees by illness or infirmity, Barfoot’s central characters nevertheless assert their right to retain agency, to “be in charge of our own selves.”
Against a background of the retirement home’s “forced jollity,” they begin to form a small, rebellious community. Indeed, the reader soon learns that each of them came to the Idyll Inn bearing secrets that have shaped their lives. Sylvia’s affair with her husband’s law partner produced her only child, a daughter from whom she still keeps the truth of her parentage.
Past transgressions and present loyalties bind new friends together. So too does language. With Barfoot, characteristically, words matter on many levels. The glittering sharpness of her narration slices through cant with diamond-like precision. The prospect of moving from the Idyll Inn to a nursing home, for example, is described as “the next step down en route to incapacity’s basement.” Greta, for whom English is her second language, wrestles with precise definitions and considers the difficulty of “not always knowing if words contain more than they say.” George’s speech has been affected by his stroke: he has lost language and is lost without it.
Ruth brings to their group the language of newspaper accounts, reading aloud stories of human and environmental disasters—”tales of plunder, destruction, viciousness, greed, just plain carelessness.” Her hope is to bind them to her in her last secret, the one around which the novel pivots.
The brilliance of Barfoot’s novel lies in her persuasive case that these four elderly people matter—and in her ability to make us care for them in their full and messy humanity. It also lies in the humour and tenderness with which the remaining events unfold.
One of the novel’s last images is of George calling out “Yes, yes, yes . . . just as if nothing has changed.” This Molly Bloom-like affirmation is shaded by events and by other words that enter George’s head—”For the time being.” “The time being,” as Barfoot reminds us, is after all, all that we have.
Exit Lines, along with other of my favourites among Barfoot’s dark comedies (Critical Injuries, Luck, Getting Over Edgar, Family News), shines a light into the recesses of its characters’ hearts, illuminating their frail and imperfect selves.
Greta reflects at one point, “People think love is naturally scattered about in everyone’s hearts, as thick on the ground as shiny bits of sand on a beach. It is not. It is rare as gold, as emeralds, as compassion.”
Joan Barfoot’s rare gift as a writer is to show us, in and through her characters, both the love and the compassion that are needed if we are to prevail.
The next installment of the London Reads book club tackles Exit Lines, by Canadian author and Western graduate Joan Barfoot March 11, 7 p.m.
Huron University College, Great Hall
13491 Western Rd., London
More information: www.londonreads.uwo.ca/barfoot.html
The writer is principal of Huron University College.