Exit Lines

The Idyll Inn, the setting for Joan Barfoot's brilliant eleventh novel, Exit Lines , is a pastel-hued care facility designed for seniors "with healthy incomes but varying hopes, despairs, abilities and deformities." In scathing detail, Barfoot describes the Idyll Inn's plastic plants, inoffensive art and pallid recreational activities, all familiar to any reader who has had occasion to visit such a place - or to live in one. Running the show (or...