L'heure mauve by Michèle Ouimet (review)

An imagined retirement home in the affluent Montreal borough of Outremont, Le Bel Âge is peopled by retired professors, judges, widowed housewives, and others—including a fiercely independent recent arrival named Jacqueline, the book's main character. Like Ouimet herself, Jacqueline has enjoyed a long career in journalism in Montreal and even reported from war zones in very dangerous parts of the world. As they tend to do in other social spaces, birds of a more particular feather flock together inside Le Bel Âge, the popular group gathering at "la prestigieuse table des six, qui fait l'envie de tout le monde" (21). This, of course, is in the part of the facility that is first referred to in the novel as a "résidence pour personnes âgées" (11)—and the inner circle the least inclined to include Jacqueline. The less fortunate residents, debilitated by dementia and other grave physical realities, are relegated to the second floor. Known as "les atteints" among the more able-bodied residents, these denizens are those who require too much regular care to live with any semblance of independence or privacy at all (41). Recently retired from reporting, somewhat against her own will, Jacqueline is horrified by the exclusion of "les atteints" and creates a significant disturbance, inside and outside Le Bel Âge, in order to draw attention to what she feels is their unjust treatment by the management. Yet, as one might expect of a 2017 baby-boomer novel about a nursing home, the indignity is less in the sequestering of Alzheimer's patients than in the realization, by the book's main characters, that they are now officially at the end of their lives. The novel gives regular glimpses of residents' lives prior to their residency—sometimes against their will—at Le Bel Âge. Georges was a dashing philanderer, a successful academic and author who slept with so many of his own students that, now on the verge of dementia, he has lost count. Jacqueline was professionally successful and a free spirit, in love for a while with a married man but always a little nauseated by what she perceives as the life endured by all married women, especially mothers. The book's main character, Jacqueline remains independent, coming and going as she pleases but increasingly desperate to keep fighting for things she finds important. "C'est la bataille qui vous rend heureuse?" asks her therapist during a visit in which Jacqueline is feeling especially anxious about no longer serving an important purpose. "Peut-être," she replies, "ça me donne une raison de me lever le matin" (237). In its first third, L'heure mauve feels a little like a requiem for the passing of a generation that cannot believe it is old, whose core identity still feels rooted in its own notions of youthfulness and rebellion. But about halfway through, even the most suspicious younger reader is drawn in by the humanity in these characters.