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2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
IF THIS BE LIFE a review by Rebecca Duncan Judy Dearlove. Play On!: A Novel. Resource Center for Women & Ministry in the South Press, 2019.
REBECCA DUNCAN is Mary Lynch Johnson Professor of English at Meredith College in Raleigh, NC, where she teaches British and global literatures and professional writing courses. She earned her BA in History and her MA in International Affairs from Ohio University and a PhD in English from Florida State University. Her essays and fiction have appeared in Mosaic, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Pisgah Review, Southeast Review, and Mused: BellaOnline Literary Review. Read her essay on North Carolina poet/journalist Zoe Kincaid Brockman in NCLR 2019. JUDY DEARLOVE is a retired English professor living in Durham, NC. She earned both her MA and PhD in English literature from the University of Virginia. Her debut novel, Play On!, is a finalist for the INDIES Book of the Year Award.
As the country’s seventy-three million Baby Boomers plunge or phase into retirement, the stories this generation enjoys are likely to follow them to new places and reflect new perspectives on life. And so we might ask, What will those stories look like? Will they follow the lead of popular entertainment and give us the sitcom chuckles of Golden Girls or the hijinks of the films Cocoon and The Last Laugh? Will they focus on the end of life as a cipher for all that comes before, as Jill McCorkle’s multiple narrators do in her 2013 novel Life after Life? Hollywood’s stereotyping of the elderly as useless and befuddled goes hand in hand with our culture’s tendency to shuttle our seniors off to retirement communities, assisted living facilities, and nursing homes, where they fill the hours with bingo and shuffleboard, watch Lawrence Welk reruns, and await the dying of the light. Yet it is unlikely that many Boomers will accept an early passage into agedness, in life or in literature. As a demographic, they enjoy better health and longer life expectancies than their predecessors, and many continue to interact with and contribute to society long after a traditional retirement age. It is this new narrative for seniors that Judy Dearlove’s Play On! explores through the adventures and perspectives of characters who, from within their Arizona retirement community, resist both isolation and decline. A colorful cast of characters inside and outside the Foothills Retirement Community enliv-
ens this touching buddy story focused on the feisty Maxine and the more temperate Louise. Maxine is a retired English professor who remains angry ten years after the sudden death of her beloved husband, Tom. Louise absorbs Maxine’s intensity as she totes around a breathing device on a cart named Seabiscuit. The two women, eightyish in the 1990s, as Internet and email technologies are emerging, read a job posting for an assistant director at the Foothills that reflects a very circumscribed vision of life for the residents. Just for kicks, they craft a response and at the touch of the Enter key, discover that they have submitted an online application using an alias. So much for the stereotypical decline in these women. Maxine, as Octavia Olson, is invited to interview for the job. Although she has applied on a lark and more or less by accident, she decides she truly wants to give it a try. To do so, she and Louise rely on the encouragement and assistance of a younger generation. Celine, the Foothills housekeeper, suggests a remote interview using holograph projection that will maintain Maxine’s cover, at least for a while. Maxine’s godson, Peter, makes it happen. One thing leads to the next, and the adventurous pair find themselves frequenting a local night club and palling around with a drag queen and the leathered, tattooed leader of a motorcycle gang for reasons that should not be spoiled here. So much for isolation and confinement within their community.