The spectator birdbyWallace Earle Stegner

The Spectator Bird (1976) is a 1977 National Book Award for Fiction winning novel by Wallace Stegner. The book features recurrent character Joe Allston, who was also in All the Little Live Things (1967), as an old  man who is tired of life and believes have become a mere spectator in it. His life starts to change when he receives a postcard from friend, which makes him review old journal of the trip to Denmark. The book portrays how decisions made during yesteryear affects the present and future and how it is impossible not to be an active participator in life.


---

Nearly ten years after the publication of ALL THE LITTLE LIVE THINGS, this novel, which won the National Book Award, brings the story of Joe Allston and his wife to the beginning of old age. They are both nearly 70 (though Stegner himself was about five years short of the mark when he finished the book) and suffering from all the usual crotchets and infirmities that tend to afflict most of us at this stage in life. But Joe is now reflecting more on his past than he was in the earlier book and, as with Lyman Ward in ANGLE OF REPOSE, the medium that puts him in this meditative frame of mind is a literary one--in his case, a diary Joe kept during a visit to Denmark many years before and which he starts reading to his wife. Unlike most of his novels, THE SPECTATOR BIRD is strong on plot, which concerns the mysterious background of a countess with which they share a pension in Copenhagen; there may (or may not) have been incest somewhere along the way, and there definitely were some strange goings-on during the Nazi occupation in World War II, during which the countess's husband served as a quisling. Portions of the novel, then, have an almost gothic character,and Stegner has some fun with this, particularly when he is able to work into the narrative a visit with the great gothic novelist, Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen), author of OUT OF AFRICA, among many other books and stories (Stegner and his wife, Mary, actually did have such a meeting with the writer). But for all its dark and somewhat melodramatic underpinnings, THE SPECTATOR BIRD is about age, and loyalty, and the durability of a relationship that can withstand even the temptation offered by a beautiful Danish countess. There is almost a love affair started here, and the scene in which Joe and the countess stumble to the brink then step back just in time, is one of those epiphanous moments that Stegner was better at than just about anyone. It is a melancholy book, but at the same time a testament to the lasting character of a love properly honored.
--By T.H. Watkins