Review by New York Times Review
FROM the knowing grandmother in the novel "Tending to Virginia" to the failing mother stressing out her daughter in the short story "Going Away Shoes," elderly characters have always played their parts in Jill McCorkle's smalltown, intergenerational fiction. But the "manly voice" with "pipes and whistles in his sound," as Shakespeare put it, reverberates in its own distinctive fashion in the retirement home setting of McCorkle's new novel, where the yoga class finds "a whole roomful of old folks breathing deeply and chanting - one sounding like a sewing machine and another a squirrel." In its quiet way, "Life After Life," McCorkle's sixth novel, is a daring venture - an attempt to tell a big story inside a tiny orbit. At the Pine Haven retirement center in the author's familiar, fictional Fulton, N.C., dinner is finished early, which is fine with sunny Sadie, "who likes to watch 'Jeopardy' in her pajamas." Other occupants are less delighted with the place: crusty Toby, a retired schoolteacher, repairs to her room, "haunted by little past moments," and Rachel, once a lawyer up North, sniffs at Southern manners and sweet tea, succumbing to "a wave of time sickness" for her former life. The prospect of spending hours among these people might seem tedious to a reader not having to bunk at Pine Haven himself ("Who in the hell wants dinner at 5:30?" as feisty Rachel complains), but McCorkle is a poet of the everyday. The 26-year-old house beautician, C. J., asks residents, "Does that feel good?" while rubbing lotion into their "old worn-out feet. Some call them Pat and Mike. Some call them the old dogs. One calls them her little tootsies." McCorkle has an ear for Southern banter, both funny and sad. Stanley, another retired lawyer, "often sees the arrival of the funeral home car over at nursing. They try to be discreet but how impossible is that?" Although his theatrically feigned dementia seems an overworked story line, he's nevertheless comic in his outbursts. "Here I am, big Billygoat Gruff ready for some action," he proclaims in the dining hall, scandalizing the ladies. McCorkle wisely seeks out connection, gnarled hands reaching for others as the clock ticks down. As if trying to supply more oxygen for her narrative, she expands Pine Haven society to include the family that lives next door, most engagingly 12-year-old Abby, who treats the residents like surrogate grandparents. Less successfully drawn is Abby's mother, restless in her marriage and, like the beautician and a hospice volunteer named Joanna, looking for love in all the wrong places. The back stories for these women tend to divert the reader's focus from the main action at Pine Haven. And the goodhearted Joanna, who composes minibiographies for recently deceased residents, has a suspiciously polished literary style for a woman who spends most of her time running a hot dog emporium. Clearly, McCorkle is after more than final dramas. The novel's title hints at resurrection, but don't mistake "Life After Life" for a peek at heaven in the classic sense. For each character reaching Shakespeare's seventh age, "sans everything," McCorkle offers a heightened, stream-ofconsciousness journey, punctuated with a last glance backward. But the real successes in this novel are found in simple, often luminous moments this side of the great divide - when, for example, Stanley puts Herb Alpert's "Taste of Honey" on his antique stereo, welcoming Rachel into his arms. "We can dance to this one," she says. "We can pretend it's 1965." In a Southern retirement community, gnarled hands reach for others as the clock ticks down. Roy Hoffman is the author of an essay collection, "Alabama Afternoons" and a forthcoming novel, "Come Landfall."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 26, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
Agatha Christie believed that an English village was a microcosm of the world, containing all the virtues and evils of the greatest metropolis. The same might be said of Pine Haven Retirement Center, the hub of McCorkle's new novel, which interweaves the stories of residents, staff, and visitors in a small Carolina town. There is Joanna, the hospice worker, who records the lives of those passing; Sadie, the longtime resident and onetime schoolteacher, who believes everyone remains their eight-year-old self at heart; and the judgmental Marge, called Extralarge Marge Barge by the blustery, rude Stanley. Each tells his or her own story, and the bit player in one story becomes the protagonist of the next, providing an ever-clearer picture of the crisscrossing histories that have made these people who they are. By turns comic, insightful, and heart wrenching, Life after Life shows how old age can give us a second chance: to see ourselves rightly, be truer to those we love, and inspire those we leave behind.--Weber, Lynn Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
At the edge of death, one key memory will take hold: a meal in a beautiful restaurant, a humiliating sexual rejection, or a sky full of fireworks and stars. In McCorkle's sixth novel (after Going Away Shoes), she returns to her native North Carolina for an unsparing look at the regrets that haunt the end of a life. McCorkle's saddest and most unlovable characters are her most compelling; single mother C.J. is desperate not to repeat her mother's cycle of prostitution and suicide but knows she faces long odds. Stanley enters a nursing home and feigns dementia to keep his son Ned at a distance, reflecting, "How awful to come to the end and see that all you've been is another goddamned link in the chain that keeps out the happiness." Mired in a hopeless marriage, Ben tries to reach out to his daughter Abby with magic tricks. Vanishing girls are a recurring theme; some are lost but a few, through luck and kindness, have their lives and loves restored. Hospice volunteer Joanna, Ben's childhood friend and former assistant, is the point of connection among many storylines; she comforts the dying and records what she knows of their lives, and, like McCorkle, she's more interested in capturing moments that ring true than in providing closure. In the end it's not at all clear that families or childhood loves will reconcile and have happy endings, which is a lot like life. Agent: Liz Darhansoff, Darhansoff & Verrill. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
It takes a skillful author to write a book about death that leaves the reader feeling uplifted, and McCorkle (Going Away Shoes) is such an author. Her multilayered new novel centers on the colorful residents of Pine Haven Retirement Center in small-town North Carolina. We learn why each resident is at the center, and about their lives and families, but two women who work at the facility are also central to the story. Most intriguing is the intersection between life and death created by entries from the journal of a hospice worker named Joanna. Joanna's recollections of a patient's death are immediately followed by the dying person's last thoughts and memories. Characters are introduced then exit, reinforcing the theme of disappearing, of moving in and out of life and relationships, with some characters quickly letting go and others holding on to the past. VERDICT This excellent novel, unusual in its shifting construction, will be appreciated by readers drawn to stories about older characters, or death and dying, but there is much more to it. Fans of Southern writers such as Lee Smith and Kaye Gibbons should definitely give it a try.-Shaunna E. Hunter, Hampden-Sydney Coll. Lib., VA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Assisted living residents and a hospice worker confront the inevitable with grit and humor. A potentially clichd unifying device, the claustrophobic world of Pine Haven Retirement Facility (located next to a cemetery no less), is here put to innovative use. Passing the narrative baton are Pine Haven's residents and staff, friends and spouses, all confined, willingly or not, to McCorkle's familiar turf, Fulton, N.C. Joanna, a hospice worker rescued from suicide by a dog, finds fulfillment easing the passage of the dying. Abby, who inhabits the house next to Pine Haven, is an outcast preteen with a social-climbing mother, Kendra, and a feckless, unreliable father, Ben (a magician and Joanna's childhood friend). Abby, a daily visitor to Pine Haven, bereft after the disappearance of her dog, Dollbaby, finds a mentor in 85-year-old Sadie, a former third-grade teacher. Sadie discovers a kindred spirit in another teacher, Toby, Pine Haven's youngest retiree, who bemoans the sorry state of children's literature today. C.J., a pierced and tattooed single mom who does hair and nails at Pine Haven, has a much older married lover who is also the father of her son, Kurt. Rachel, a widowed Jewish lawyer from Boston, comes to Pine Haven to take up residence near her deceased paramour, Joe, who is buried, along with his wife, in the adjoining cemetery. Stanley, one of Fulton's most prominent citizens, is sliding into dementia, cajoling, goading and insulting Pine Haven's female majority, and reveling in bizarre obsessions: WWF stars and '60s-era lounge lizard LPs. But could his apparent Alzheimer's be a bid for independence instead of dependency? Seemingly unrelated and insignificant clues sowed throughout raise other questions as these lives coalesce. For example, is Dollbaby really missing? Who's leaving notes in a cemetery vase? Are both Kendra and C.J. placing their hopes in the same married man? Any residual predictability is dispelled by the jaw-dropping ending. McCorkle's masterful microcosm invokes profound sadness, harsh insight and guffaws, often on the same page.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
