Rules for Old Men Waiting: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Peter Pouncey (Author)
Key Phrases: wire party, Peter Pouncey, Private Alston, Captain Leslie (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Begun in 1981, this slender, unpretentious, lyrical and deeply moving novel by the president emeritus of Amherst College was more than two decades in the making. The year is 1987, and octogenarian Robert MacIver is alone, in failing health and debilitated with grief over his wife's recent death, hiding out in the dead of winter in a remote, unheated Cape Cod house "older than the Republic." Shocked into confronting the seriousness of his plight when the timbers of the front porch collapse under his weight, he retreats back inside the house and realizes that he wants to live out his remaining days—however few in number—with dignity. Thus resolved, he formulates his Ten Commandments for Old Men Waiting, the seventh of which is "Work every morning." And so he decides to write a short story about an infantry company in "No Man's Land" in WWI, which will draw on the interviews he conducted with victims of poison gas that he used for his first book, the well-received oral history Voices Through the Smoke. Pouncey's novel thus becomes a story within a novel; and MacIver's story is elegantly juxtaposed with his memories from his own long life. Pouncey's first book is proof that sometimes greatness comes slowly and in small packages. Agent, Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency. (Apr.)
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From The Washington Post
Like many other academics who have spent years professing the literary works of others, in his retirement Peter Pouncey, professor of classical historiography and distinguished former president of Amherst College, has now given it a go himself. The results are mixed. On the one hand, he is a big-hearted and deft writer with a fine eye and decent ear; as one would expect, his novel makes ready use of the wisdoms and observations of age. On the other hand, as one would also expect of a first novelist, despite his age, Pouncey makes his share of rookie mistakes. "The poet thinks with his poem," said William Carlos Williams, and the same must be said about the storyteller and his story. In Rules for Old Men Waiting, the academic Pouncey tries to have it both ways: to dramatize not a story, but thinking about a story. In my mind, despite charms on nearly every page, it doesn't work.

Rules for Old Men Waiting is an elaborately built novel, a Russian matrioshka of a book. The story at the center concerns three Englishmen in the trenches in World War I. It's a good story: three well-imagined characters, a whiff of gas and cordite, a smattering of homoeroticism and a doleful denouement that has far more to do with class differences on the British side than with anything lobbed at them by the Germans. So far, more than good.

This story comes to us neither as written nor narrated, but rather in bits and pieces as imagined by its author, Robert MacIver, an 80-some-year-old emeritus history professor living out his last weeks in a crumbling vacation home on Cape Cod. At the opening of the book, MacIver's wife, Margaret, dies, and knowing that the end is not far for him -- he is dying of some nicely unspecified body failure -- he settles in for the last project: awaiting death. After a few weeks he recognizes that he can do this either heedlessly or alertly and, choosing the latter, formulates the list of rules suggested by the title, among them: eat, bathe, burn books by rival scholars to keep warm and -- critically -- tell a story to its end.

And so it goes. Day after day, the old military historian MacIver adds to the travails and fates of the upright Lieutenant Dodds, the murderous Sergeant Braddis, the sensitive, arty Private Callum. As MacIver assembles the book, it is clear that it is a bit of romance despite its occasionally gritty details, and it will sound quite like All Quiet on the Western Front. In one passage, for example, a German machine gun "could have spelled havoc," but our hero moves "low and smartly to the right," lobbing a grenade at the Germans that "finished their effort." MacIver doesn't go into what "finishing their effort" looked like, but no matter; he isn't readying this for publication anyway.

At the end of his day's work, MacIver occupies his evenings listening to the slow movements of everything from Beethoven's Archduke Trio to Mahler's Sixth Symphony. In these evenings the memories and reflections are allowed to pour out: early acclaim as a student and rugby superstar in his native Scotland, marriage to a beautiful and successful artist, a charmed academic career, a son off effortlessly to Yale, sabbaticals in Scotland and Paris, work going well no matter the venue, a life simply packed with good fortune all rather smugly accepted. I confess that I got a little tired of MacIver's success. Doctors randomly consulted can quote from his work, and, on the last day of his life, a former student says on national TV that "the most important lesson I learned for my profession I learned from Robert MacIver." I hope Pouncey meant that as a piece of academic gallows humor, but I'm not sure he did. Even the great tragedy of MacIver's life, the "bubble of the idyll" recalled in some detail, merely slows him down for a semester or two and does not dispel the feeling that this guy had it nailed from the beginning.

So we have lives imagined and lives remembered, and despite much charm and wisdom, the pitfalls of this novel's plan are obvious: In attempting to dramatize the rather undramatic act of writing, there are simply too many ways to go wrong. Not enough opportunity to throw the unexpected at the protagonist; too much opportunity for sermonizing. If I formulated a list of rules for old men writing, I would propose, first, that one avoid a novel about an old man writing and, second, that one avoid a novel about an old man remembering. Writing and remembering are already embarrassingly self-conscious and self-congratulatory acts, and MacIver is far too satisfied with his life to permit any real struggle on the page. Pouncey clearly recognizes the dangers in his project, and thus we have the Great War story, but despite his efforts at the end to use it as a text for some rather academic musings, even MacIver doesn't consider getting the story down as anything but a pastime.

Still, it's all well written, all honest, a quietly wise piece of work if not a particularly successful novel. Here one says to the first novelist what virtually anyone who has ever completed a first novel -- published or unpublished -- has been told by people who care: lovely prose, fine characters, good you got that one done and out of the way. What's next?

Reviewed by Christopher Tilghman
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Random House; First Edition edition (April 12, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400063701
• ISBN-13: 978-1400063703
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #629,116 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Devastating novel about love and war, June 5, 2005

By	sb-lynn (Santa Barbara, California United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

I just read the last line of this book a few minutes ago, and all I can say is that I am quite stunned. I normally finish one book, and pick up another right away, but right now I just want to sit and think about THIS book.

Summary, no spoilers:

80 year old historian Robert MacIver is dying. He is at his old house on the Cape, and he has made a list of "rules" to follow these last weeks of his life. These rules involve such things as maintaining his personal hygiene, and eating a healthy diet. Rule seven is "Work every morning. Nap in afternoon if needed. The companion to this rule is, "Work to consist of telling a story to the end, not just shards, but the whole pot".

Robert begins to write a story, his last story, about a group of soldiers in W.W.I. As he is writing this tale, he reminisces about his life.

In doing so, we meet his beloved wife Margaret, and his son David. And we are taken through 3 wars, W.W.I, W.W.II (where Robert served), and the Vietnam War.

This is a devastating novel.

Although this is a short book (just barely over 200 pages), it is very dense, and it is not a quick read. Perhaps there might even be too much description, as I found myself tempted to skim at times.

Despite any minor quibbles, I found this a wonderful story, with a terrific beginning, AND end. In fact the last page (the last sentence!) left me reeling.

Highly recommended. This book would be an EXCELLENT choice for your book club.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Full of wit and depth...great with a glass of scotch, April 13, 2005

By	Owen J. Stearns - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

While not an old man waiting myself...not yet, anyway...this book resonated strongly with me, largely because the characters are so compelling you can't wait to see what happens to them. With all these young authors today testing their chops with literary cutenesses (exhibit A - Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything is Illuminated"), this novel is refreshing in that it is straightforward, yet full of depth and subtlety, particularly as Pouncey weaves together the 3 narratives of the book in the latter half. Clearly the product of a more experienced life, it's surprising that a book that is anchored around the subject of dying is so damn funny at times.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Novel Worth Waiting For, June 24, 2005

By	I, Reader (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

Peter Pouncey, now president emeritus of Amherst College, has written his first novel -- long in coming, perhaps, but worth the wait. Having just finished Nicole Krauss' pretentious The History of Love, I recognized from Pouncey's first pages that I had wandered into a truly well-rendered piece of writing -- writing of restraint that nevertheless reveals depths, an understanding of human nature that never shows off its virtuosity (eg, see Krauss). Pouncey's main character, the old man MacIver, former Scottish rugby champ and Columbia history prof, is a diminished man -- yet despite the deep empathy one feels for him, it is not solicited. MacIver hasn't "evolved" far from his true nature -- revealed in flashbacks -- but he does understand it and continues to battle with it. The death of his wife has plunged him into a lonely life in their Cape Cod house -- and he fights the decline of his health while attempting to write a story about WWI, his historical area of expertise. This tale of the trenches becomes the story within the story -- but it is in itself an engaging narrative, not a gratuitous attempt to seem Borgesian (eg., see Krauss). The writing has such clarity and thoughtful simplicity that I literally had to catch my breath at some sentences. The narrator, whose manner parallels MacIver's more fluent and considerate aspects, clearly loves his characters. It is a voice of acceptance that refuses to compromise with the general audience's desire for snap-shut happy endings or puerile intimations of mystery in life (eg, see Krauss). A tough novel of tenderness.