Volume 52, Number 10 · June 9, 2005
In Love and War
By W.S. Merwin
Rules for Old Men Waiting
by Peter Pouncey
Random House, 210 pp., $21.95
At the beginning of Rules for Old Men Waiting we come upon a weathered, somewhat dilapidated summer house in the woods on Cape Cod, and its sole remaining occupant, Robert MacIver, Scottish born and bred, a big man physically and morally, and in his youth a renowned rugby player. In his later years he had been a military historian of some distinction, a pioneer collector of oral accounts of soldiers from the trenches of World War I. By the time we meet him, in the first novel by Peter Pouncey (himself a retired professor of literature), MacIver knows he has an ailment that will end his days, but before that happens we see other losses overtake him. First of all, the death of his wife, Margaret, after a long, happy marriage. She had died in that house on the Cape, which had been their idyllic summer retreat for over thirty years, the place to which they had withdrawn altogether when her sickness was nearing its term. During their final months there he had deliberately chosen to ignore the upkeep of the building rather than allow her to be disturbed by invasions of repair crews, and so six months after her death, as the fall arrived, and then the snow, he faced a Massachusetts winter with a decrepit heating system and no firewood.
Review, 3641 words
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