The back stories for these women tend to divert the reader’s focus from the main action at Pine Haven. 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.
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. McCorkle wisely seeks out connection, gnarled hands reaching for others as the clock ticks down. “Here I am, big Billygoat Gruff ready for some action,” he proclaims in the dining hall, scandalizing the ladies. 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. Stanley, another retired lawyer, “often sees the arrival of the funeral home car over at nursing. McCorkle has an ear for Southern banter, both funny and sad. J., asks residents, “Does that feel good?” while rubbing lotion into their “old worn-out feet. 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. 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.
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. 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.” 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 small-town, intergenerational fiction.