| Featured Book |
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| Just West of Famous |
| Charles Baxter doesn't pull any punches when he answers Lisa Coutant's questions in this month's author interview.
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| In this issue: |
An encore poem from Gol McAdam
Claire Litton's amazing Authenticity Leads
A collection of poetry from Craig Kirchner
New fiction from Maria Pollack and Josh Stewart
Plus great poetry from Corie Feiner, Gary Wilkins, and Sherry Pasquerello |
| Coming Next Month |
Anne Frasier has some fresh ideas about how to boost her book sales,
Ron Hogan is the ultimate literary insider - and next month he's going to take the Picolata Review into his world for an exclusive look around.
Plus:More great poetry, short fiction, and features. Enough great writing to satisfy any literary palate.
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| The Picolata Review |
Managing Editor Mark Pettus is a full time journalist in St. Augustine, Florida, and author of the novel, Transit Gloria
Features Editor Lisa Coutant is a consultant, former writer for the Philadelphia Theatre Review, and a fiction writer. She is also Vice President of the professional writing group, Pennwriters.
Poetry Editor Andy H-H., is a poet who lives in the beautiful countryside of West Yorkshire
with his partner and a menagerie of pets (a sheep occasionally stares in through the kitchen window), in a home surrounded by literary history. Ted Hughes was born there, Sylvia Plath is buried nearby, and first Emily Bronte, then Kate
Bush, made a certain stretch of desolate land five minutes' walk away very famous indeed.
Fiction Editor Serenity Banks's day job is as an industry magazine editor. She also writes an online sex-advice column, and is trying to find an agent for her latest horror novel.
The Picolata Review is a monthly online publication, and a place to find emerging writers and poets. We welcome you, and hope we'll see you again. If you forget our address, look for us just a little west of famous. |
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| Volume 1, Number 2 August, 2006 |
| The Picolata Reviews: Rules for Old Men Waiting, by Peter Pouncey |
by Debra Hamel
After the death of his wife Margaret in the spring of 1987, Robert MacIver himself fell into disrepair--failing to eat properly or to keep in contact with his former colleagues, not seeing to the work that needed doing on his isolated house on the Cape, more decrepit and older, even, than he. Given his failing health, MacIver's further decline is inevitable. He is resigned to it, nearly welcomes it, but after an accident jolts him from his despair he determines, as he puts it, to retrench.
He establishes a set of ten rules for himself, "a simple skeleton of the well-ordered life for a feeble old man," by means of which he intends to live with some dignity until the end, and to approach death on something like his own terms. The rules include practical instructions for keeping himself fed and clothed and clean as well as directives for keeping the house heated. Having failed to lay in firewood during his months of lethargy, this last is a serious issue. MacIver decides that he will burn picture frames and furniture--though not "articles of fine craftsmanship"--as well as "books of rival scholars and other trash, before good books and my own."
Arguably the most important of MacIver's ten rules, however, is that in which he imposes on himself some manner of work. As a retired professor of history, specializing in the First World War, it is not surprising that MacIver elects as his final project in life to tell a story set in the trenches of that conflict. The story he writes, of men consumed by rage over private grievances, is as nuanced and well-written and compelling as MacIver's own. It spills into the book in fragments as MacIver writes it, the stories of his life and his imagination moving in lock-step toward their inexorable, parallel ends.
Rules for Old Men Waiting does not merely record the final months of a once fearsome man. Readers are shown MacIver also in earlier periods of his life as the old Scot, literally feverish in the evenings after long hours at the typewriter, allows himself to remember them: MacIver as angry adolescent, fatherless after World War I, his venom given purpose on the rugby field; Lieutenant Commander MacIver on board the HMS Constant in September 1944; MacIver as historian and teacher and as husband to Margaret, the near perfect woman who "tamed the wild boar on Parnassus"; MacIver as father. To readers it feels as if Pouncey's character were spat whole into vastly different circumstance from one moment to the next, his character remaining much the same, though of course this is the effect of looking at a long life in disconnected segments.
Pouncey's novel, his first, is a beautifully written piece of prose, punctuated by innumerable well-wrought sentences that slow the reader: "The house and the old man were well matched," the book begins, "both large framed and falling fast. The house had a better excuse, MacIver thought; he was eighty, but the house was older than the Republic, had been a century old when Thoreau walked the Cape, though he couldn't have seen it tucked away in the non-descript maze of scrub oak." The author clearly knows his way around the English language, and his classical training--Pouncey is a retired classicist--is likewise apparent in his vocabulary and Homeric theme and references. Rules for Old Men Waiting is a thought-provoking read, gentle, and sad in the way a life lived tolerably well but ended, or due to end, is sad. The dialogue in the book, of which there is not much, does not always ring true. And the final chapter--not the epilogue--goes on a few pages longer than necessary as MacIver remembers a further episode from his rugby-playing days which seems, however, out of step with what has preceded.
I'm not precisely sure yet what we are to make of the relationship between Pouncey's powerful story-within-a-story and the narrative that frames it, whether the shorter work is intended to bring out the themes of the larger work, for example, the menis motivating MacIver's characters to mirror his own, but it bears thinking on. And Pouncey's slender volume, if it hasn't already been made abundantly clear, definitely merits your time.
Rules for Old Men Waiting
by Peter Pouncey
Random House, 2005
210 pages
ISBN 1400063701
Debra Hamel is the author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece (Yale University Press, 2003). She has been writing book reviews for publication on her book review site, book-blog.com, since 2003. Debra is also the genius (sic) behind Buy a Friend a Book, the site that urges visitors to buy a friend a book for no good reason during four BAFAB weeks a year. She writes and blogs from her subterranean lair in North Haven, CT, where she lives with her husband and two daughters.
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