The Spectator Bird
by Wallace Stegner
Summary
Joe Allston is a retired literary agent in his seventies, living in the California hills with his wife Ruth, cataloguing his ailments with bitter wit and conducting a running argument with the whole idea of the modern world. He calls himself a spectator bird: a man who has watched his own life from a branch rather than living it, and the novel is the story of the one time that almost changed.
A postcard arrives from Astrid, a Danish countess the Allstons knew twenty years before, and it sends Joe to the drawer where he keeps the journals of that trip. Under Ruth's quiet insistence he reads them aloud to her, evening by evening, and the book alternates between the reading and the remembering. The journals cover the darkest season of their marriage: they had gone to Denmark in flight from the death of their only son, a beach bum whose drowning may not have been an accident, and in Copenhagen they lodged with Astrid, an aristocrat ostracised for reasons that unfold slowly and get worse the further in the journals go, a family scandal involving her scientist father that reads like something out of the gothic.
What Ruth is listening for, and what Joe has never quite said, is how close he came to Astrid, and the last pages, in which a long marriage inspects its oldest scar and decides what it amounts to, are Stegner at his very best.
Around two hundred and fifteen pages, dry, civilised and quietly devastating.
Best for readers who want the novel of old age written from inside it, with a comic surface over genuine grief.
Historical Context & Significance
The Spectator Bird won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1977, five years after Angle of Repose had taken the Pulitzer, and the two novels are siblings: both use a caustic, ailing narrator reading documents aloud as a way of auditing a marriage and a life. Joe Allston had appeared before, in All the Little Live Things, and Stegner granted him the prize winning finale.
Wallace Stegner was by then the dean of Western American letters twice over, founder of the Stanford writing program whose students ran from Larry McMurtry to Ken Kesey and Robert Stone, and a conservation statesman whose Wilderness Letter had helped argue the 1964 Wilderness Act into being.
The award itself arrived in the middle of the prize's identity crisis years, and Stegner's win was read by some as the traditionalists' answer to the experimental splits earlier in the decade: a plainly made, deeply felt novel about marriage and mortality, chosen without a tie.