Joe Allston
thinks of himself as a spectator bird — watching from the
rafters — and, feeling the aches and pains of being almost
70, is a crotchety one at that. He and his wife, Ruth, have been living
in California for eight years since his retirement as a
literary agent in New York — a profession he
"drifted into," as he says he did everything else in his life. Their
only child, Curtis, died 20 years before, perhaps as a suicide.
One day a postcard arrives from Astrid W/K in Denmark, which gets Joe
searching for the journal he kept when he and Ruth traveled in Denmark,
his mother's birthplace, in the year after Curtis's death. Ruth asks
Joe to read the journal aloud to her, hoping to finally discuss an
unresolved question from that trip. Getting to the critical passage
stirs up intense emotions in Joe, who confronts "the
possibility I had renounced 20 years before and carried around with me
like a cyst ever since."
This is a book of comfort for anyone of a certain age who, like Joe,
feels disappointed and regrets that there has not been one significant
event in his life that he planned. Being a spectator bird can bring
rewards. The Spectator
Bird is also a meditation on aging, duty, and the
fulfillment of a long marriage. Just over 200 pages, it displays
Stegner's elegant, precise economy of words. It won the National Book
Award.
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