RULES FOR OLD MEN WAITING

Name: RULES FOR OLD MEN WAITING
Author: Peter Pouncey
ISBN: 1-4000-6370-1

by Peter Pouncey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2005

Despite minor flaws (sometimes overreaching, Pouncey tends to push his points too hard, and David’s pivotal decision to...

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A strong debut about a dying historian—from the 67-year-old former president of Amherst College.

Robert MacIver is an 80-year-old war historian, a proud Scot long resident stateside, dying slowly and alone in an ancient house in the woods on Cape Cod. His beloved wife, Margaret, has died recently in the same house, and MacIver sees no reason to linger. He is not, as the famous Dylan Thomas poem has it, raging against his going, but neither is he going gentle, though rage and gentleness are the novel’s key concepts. Instead, he chooses a middle way, an orderly departure. Alarmed by visions clouding his mind, he takes himself in hand, fixing regular meals; he also embarks on a short story, containing through art the rage that grips him at the loss of loved ones. MacIver’s creation is deftly interwoven with highlights of his own life: the death of his father in WWI (his first great loss); his success as a rugby player and academic; his meeting Margaret, an accomplished painter, in New York; his blissful life with her and their only child, David; David’s early death after serving as a medic in Vietnam (his second great loss); MacIver’s subsequent marriage-threatening rages; and then the return of calm and marital happiness. A constant theme is MacIver’s violent nature and the antidote of Margaret’s gentleness. In his short story, MacIver envisions a drama played out between four soldiers in the WWI trenches. One, a good soldier but a psychopath, murders his commanding officer; that murder is avenged by a private, an outstanding artist stirred to his own murderous rage. Completion of the story eases MacIver’s path to death.

Despite minor flaws (sometimes overreaching, Pouncey tends to push his points too hard, and David’s pivotal decision to volunteer feels manufactured), this has a power and piquant unexpectedness that raise it far above the general run of first novels.

Pub Date: April 1, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-6370-1

Page Count: 230

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.