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Rules for Old Men Waiting by Peter Pouncey
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It is hard not to think of Norman Maclean and his
wonderful first book of fiction/memoir, A River Runs Through It, when reading this very good new novel. Like Maclean, Pouncey spent his life in academia and didn’t publish his first fiction until late in his 60’s. Like A River Runs Through It, Rules for Old Men Waiting is a short, contemplative novel that has the voice of a memoir. This may be pretty heady company, but it is absolutely appropriate. Recently widowed, Robert MacIver finds himself ill and alone in his eighties trying to overcome the listlessness and desperation of a life coming rapidly to an end with little purpose left. Similar depression had descended upon him when his only son died in Vietnam at age twenty, but then he had his wife to share his grief and carry him along. At the start of this book he has nothing: “The house and the old man were well matched, both large framed and failing fast.” When he stumbles and falls to his knees on the sagging front porch, he realizes that this is not the way to fade from life. To get back control, he creates his list of “rules for old men waiting” – things like making the bed, eating two good meals, listening to music, and reading. But the most important rule is: “Work every morning.” For MacIver, work becomes the writing of a story about four men in the trenches of France during World War I. As the novel unfolds, it moves back and forth from this tightly told story to MacIver’s memories of his own life: growing up as a national Scottish rugby star and successful historian; meeting, courting, worshipping his artist wife of 50 years; nurturing his talented son into Yale and then supporting his decision to drop-out to become an Army Medic and help his less fortunate peers who have been sent to suffer and die in the misguided Vietnam war and then ultimately die of wounds from a helicopter airlift. It is Pouncey’s great skill to make this potentially awkward narrative flow so seamlessly that in only two hundred pages, we feel as if we have experienced and understood all the great issues of the twentieth century and its colossal wars as well as all the personal passion, joy, art, and grief of a long-lived life. Rules for Old Men Waiting goes to the top of my Father’s Day list for my 85-year-old widowed dad. Review by Bruce Jacobs, June 1, 2005
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