There's a bounty these days of "Feisty Elder in Nursing Home" tales. They run the gamut from poignant (Todd Johnson's "The Sweet By and By") to funny but bittersweet (Clyde Edgerton's "Lunch at the Piccadilly") to keenly intelligent but sad (Skip Horack's short story "Junebelle" in his collection, "The Southern Cross") to just plain angry.
Why are these books so plentiful? Maybe because the boomers are turning 60, dealing with octogenarian relatives and realizing that this could be them before long. Despite ill health or dementia, the Elder generally hates being dependent. He or she wants ou t. But the trap has been sprung, often by once-beloved boomer children.
Worse, this has come about even though age and experience have made the Elder wise. Wiser than the keepers! If the Elder spouts profound insights in slightly ungrammatical English, perhaps it will sound even wiser.
These are such stock elements that, unless the story somehow manages to rise above its genre, it's likely to feel secondhand. Readers may think they've already read it.
This is the problem with Leslie Larson's second novel, coming three and a half years after her critically acclaimed 2006 debut, "Slipstream." In "Breaking Out of Bedlam," the writing is consistently lively. The protagonist is likable. The villain is creepy. But the material doesn't feel fresh.
As do many similar protagonists, 82-year-old Cora Sledge believes her children have unfairly imprisoned her in an assisted-living facility. "My mistake was thinking an adult could make her own decisions," she muses. "Thinking I was still an American citizen with rights that couldn't be taken away."
Never mind that Cora is morbidly obese, diabetic and dependent on a whole slew of pills she gets from different doctors. Never mind that she often forgets to dress. Incarcerated in the home, she opens a journal her granddaughter gives her, determined to "write down everything I ever wanted to say. I'm not holding nothing back and I don't give a damn what anybody thinks."
Although the idea is to dish up dirt from the past, there's so much going on in the present that nursing home gossip takes up half her pages. She spews venom about Ivy Archer, who greets her in the dining hall with quips like, "Cora, with your size you might want to pass on dessert today." She hates Albert Krol because "whatever he drinks runs down the gullies on either side of his mouth."
Cora's first alliance is with a respiratory technician who administers a breathing treatment for her emphysema. He also helps replenish her supply of the cigarettes she has smoked since she was 15 and doesn't intend to give up.
She ends up sharing those cigarettes with Vitus Kovic, a resident with "an accent that sounds like Dracula's" and such smooth, aristocratic European manners that Cora is intrigued. She begins meeting him in the garden for a smoke. To the reader, Vitus is such an obvious, sleazy villain that he might as well have a mustache to twirl and a rope in his pocket to use to tie his victims to the railroad tracks. Cora's children catch on pretty quickly, too. But Cora falls in love.
It's no platonic, "they're old, they need companionship" relationship. Cora wants Vitus physically. She lusts for him like a teenager. She looks at him and thinks dirty thoughts. It's unseemly - and, for the reader, even a little embarrassing. Yet the plan she and Vitus devise to break out of the nursing home and marry seems almost clever. Almost.
Between trysts, Cora continues to write her life story. Born in Missouri, she grew up, married a man she didn't love, had children and moved to California. Hers has been a fairly ordinary life, compounded by one tragic event that has shadowed her over the years.
Some of this she writes with a purple pen she finds in her room. Somehow, the pen is linked to a series of robberies in the nursing home. There are many small intrigues, petty jealousies and little mysteries whose outcome is never really in doubt.
This is an energetic book. Sometimes funny, mostly a little sad, pitting Cora's spirited anger against the forces that want to keep her muzzled and tame. But there's no getting away from a too-familiar plot and too-familiar characters that even the skillful writing can't overcome.
Ellyn Bache is the award-winning author of eight novels, most recently "Daughters of the Sea."
