The Lou and Joe Show

By WALTER SHAPIRO

TITLE: OLD FRIENDS

AUTHOR: TRACY KIDDER

PUBLISHER: HOUGHTON MIFFLIN; 352 PAGES; $22.95

THE BOTTOM LINE: An uplifting, wry, admirable attempt to humanize that most depressing locale -- a nursing home.

% The real-life scene reads as if Samuel Beckett had rewritten the script of The Sunshine Boys. The place is Linda Manor, a brand-new, as-good-as-it-gets nursing home in Northampton, Massachusetts. The characters are Lou Freed, 90, a nurturing, near blind optimist, and his sardonic roommate, Joe Torchio, 72, half-paralyzed by a stroke. As a sympathetic nurse gives the two men their nightly ration of multicolored pills, she reminds them that they are among the healthiest residents at Linda Manor. Her words inspire Lou and Joe from their beds to break into an impromptu routine:

Lou: God help the others if we're the best.

Joe: Anyway I can't read.

Lou: I could read if I could see.

Joe: I have half a brain and you can't see.

Lou: And so betwixt us both, we licked the platter clean. ((He smiles, then sighs.)) Ahh, dear. It's a great life, if you don't weaken.

This passage is revealing because it encapsulates all the strengths and the single glaring weakness of Old Friends. By any moral calculus, Tracy Kidder deserves garlands for using the freedom earned by his earlier successes (The Soul of a New Machine won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981; Among Schoolchildren was a best seller in 1989) to tackle such a depressing yet worthy topic. But even as he worked against the grain of commercial nonfiction, Kidder's implicit mission was to find life-affirming cheer amid the drear realities of Linda Manor.

The growing friendship between Lou and Joe is the centerpiece of Old Friends. But as with an aging vaudeville troupe, other heartwarming characters get to do their turns. Take the spry and acerbic Eleanor, 80, the impresario behind the Linda Manor Players, who "felt herself really to be more like one of the staff than a resident." Or try Bob, a former machinist, whose post- stroke vocabulary was limited to about three dozen phrases, but who still "mustered a range of expression that was quite amazing."

Kidder's characters represent the best and the brightest of nursing-home America. He notes in passing that "nearly half of all Americans who make it past sixty-five will spend some time in a nursing home," but there is nothing typical about either Linda Manor or the cast of Old Friends. Kidder, to be sure, is a talented miniaturist, not an investigative reporter. Nevertheless, it seems odd that the book never reveals who owns the nursing home or explains anything about the operations of "the huge nonprofit medical corporation that leased Linda Manor."

The juxtaposition of the publication of Old Friends and the unveiling of the Clinton health plan gives Kidder an enviable platform to comment on the most urgent public policy debate in America. The Federal Government pays the bills for most of the residents of Linda Manor through Medicare and Medicaid. Yet the larger questions of how to pay for long-term care and how to humanize the operation of most nursing homes remain beyond Kidder's purview.

Still, much of Old Friends is sheer magic. Lou and Joe, who flourish amid their infirmities thanks to their irrepressible sense of humor and unflagging curiosity, are vivid reminders that aging is as much a test of character as health. For all its inherent limitations, Old Friends will linger in memory when such current policy-wonk buzzwords as "managed competition" are long forgotten.