The Spectator Bird

by Wallace Stegner

From the “dean of Western writers” (The New York Times) and the Pulitzer Prize winning–author of Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety, his National Book Award–winning novel  A Penguin Classic Joe Allston is a retired literary agent who is, in his own words, "just killing time until time gets around to killing me." His parents and his only son are long dead, leaving him with neither ancestors nor descendants, tradition nor ties. His job, trafficking the talent of others, had not been his choice. He passes through life as a spectator. A postcard from a friend causes Allston to return to the journals of a trip he had taken years before, a journey to his mother's birth­place where he'd sought a link with the past. The memories of that trip, both grotesque and poignant, move through layers of time and meaning, and reveal that Joe Allston isn't quite spectator enough.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Literary Fiction, Book Club, Audiobook, Literature, Novels

226 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Wallace Earle Stegner was an American historian, novelist, short story writer, and environmentalist. Some call him "The Dean of Western Writers." He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977.

Reviews

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m Back.....

My first comments below: (Update follows)....
I need some time to cry in peace.
My GOD......
F#cking..... Hell......
This book will never leave me!!!!
Paul and I read pages together.....
I’m soooo thankful I read this....
The timing was perfect!!!!

Wallace Stegner is MY NUMBER 1 favorite author —
Three for three....
“Angle of Repose” and “Crossing to Safety” ... and now
“The Spectacular Bird”.... are ALL TOP *EVER* favorite books!

I don’t think I’ve ever felt more thankful for a book in my life as in this moment! I could read it a dozen more times!!

Back later....
I’ve need some quiet reflection time... small tears to explore and sit with
THANK THE GOD’S - friends- Stegner - love in my heart - for this experience!


NEW UPDATE:

I’m back....having just having finished “All The Little Live Things”....( a great companion with “The Spectacular Bird”).

Wallace Stegner was a spectacular gifted writer....opening up grand thought-provoking discussions about life.....a reminder to be truly present in our own lives....including being tender with ourselves.

“In every choice there is a component, maybe a big component of pain”.

Joe Allston was a retired literary agent who received a postcard from an old friend, a Danish countess named Astrid. At first Joe didn’t tell Ruth, his wife, about the postcard....but soon he not only shows her the postcard... but he also shows her journals he wrote twenty years ago - a diary of such - from when they visited Denmark.
Joe had just came into the house - it was windy and raining outside. Ruth was quietly reading a book....then looks up at Joe and laughs at his windy-looking-ways.
Ruth sat there watching Joe....
.... “like Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother—white hair, spectacles, Groucho Marx eyebrows, with amused house-detective eyes”.
Ruth says:
“Where’d you go?”
“Down to the study.”
“What for?”
“Look something up”.
“Sounds as if the storm is finally coming in”
“Big wind. Not much rain yet”
“A moments silence, the widening smile. You going to read some more now?”
“I thought I might. Why?”
“Then you’d better wipe the flowers off your glasses”.
“I removed my glasses and wiped the plan blossoms off and settled back down in the chair. She kept watching me”.
“What is this you’re reading so interestedly?”
“I was already wishing I’d left the notebooks in the study, where I could have read them in the morning in privacy. I didn’t suppose there was anything in them that couldn’t be read to Ruth, because I am not a confider, even in myself. Nevertheless, ever since that postcard had showed up in the mail, I had had a half-irritable sense of wanting to be alone with what it revived”.
“Papers, I said”.

Joe and Ruth had lost their only son, Curtis, 37 years old ... a tragic death while surfing...
The Danish trip was suppose to serve as a type of therapy for Joe.
Guilt, regret, and selfishness were secret emotions Joe carried inside him. With a gentle push from Ruth, Joe reads Ruth the all that he wrote. It takes many evenings. Much gets exposed - not particularly comfortable - but Ruth was wonderful. I think she knew it had to be painful forJoe to read them to her. ( hard for her to hear too- but there was no hardening or accusations coming from her).
It wasn’t a happy time.
And.....there was ‘a kiss’ between Joe and Astrid years ago ( but without reading the full story...it simply sounds like an act of cheating, betrayal, and withheld communication.....
I see it differently.....
Ruth did too ....( bless her)....
Ruth says...
“If you hadn’t fallen at least a little bit in love with her I’d have thought there was something wrong with you”.

Joe didn’t deny being smitten with Astrid - he wanted to do something for her. He hated to leave her behind.
He would’ve liked her company the rest of his life…
Joe says to Ruth:
“In Other circumstances, if you hadn’t existed, I’d certainly have tried to marry her, and I think she might have had me. But those circumstances didn’t exist, and I never really fought you about coming home. I left all that behind, and eventually I forgot her. There have been stretches of two or three years when I haven’t thought of her, not once, and if her postcard hadn’t sent me looking for that diary, I probably wouldn’t have thought of her yet. That’s kind of sad, I’m sorry about that. But I’ll tell you something else. If I played the game the way people seem to expect, and jumped into the Baltic, all for love and the world well lost, and cut myself off from you and what you and I have had together, I couldn’t have forgotten you that way. I’d have regretted you the rest of my life”.

“One of the nice things about getting something talked out is that it brings on a spell of pampering”.

Much to love and think about in this novel...
.....marriage, aging, loss, death, grief, unfulfilled relationships, regret, understanding, forgiveness, acceptance, and love. Deep love!

This book won the National book award in 1977. It feels timeless!!
The writing is gorgeous with descriptions so beautiful… it makes a reader want to read them out loud… which I did....with Paul.

I enjoyed looking at this long term marriage - thankful for my own.
There is something very endearing about Ruth and Joe....and the ending melted my heart.

[Dolors · Rating 5 out of 5]

When do we cease to be actors in our lives to become mere spectators?
Do we really get a chance to decide who we are, what we do, where we go and with whom we share all these choices as we grope in the darkness of time?

Joe Allston, a retired literary agent, is seventy years old… and has turned into an adorable curmudgeon. With no ancestors or descendants, a tragedy involving his only son still weighting on his shoulders, and his wife Ruth as remaining companion, Joe ponders about the paths he’s been walking on for the last twenty years. The self-reproach of never bonding with his son, the grief of losing him forever to the aimless waters of a remote beach, the lack of pluck to write his own novels rather than limiting himself to publish those of others, the sour taste of ageing and loneliness. Joe doesn’t shy away from his failures; he patiently dissects his remorse as he observes the bird species that twitter in his garden.

Straddling two narrative lines, one in the present time and another two decades ago when Joe and Ruth travelled to Denmark trying to escape the loss of their only child, Stegner paints an introspective landscape that sometimes acquires a too intimate tinge for the reader’s comfort.
Without sacrificing the necessary dose of self-effacing humor to balance out the dramatic charge of the storyline, and with elegant, firm stroke, Stegner delivers some delightful surprises that include meeting Karen Blixen and a mysterious Danish countess that will leave track in Joe’s memories and mean a crossroads in his life that will haunt him for the rest of his days.

I turned the last page of this tour de force with regret, knowing it will be a while until I meet a novel that is so perfectly rounded. To witness an old man revising his life, the pain of past but necessary choices and the pangs of solitude that marked his slow ascend towards fulfillment was as arduous as it was beautiful. Such kind of beauty is the one I would ask for myself when my time comes; no more, no less.

[Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometime in the mid-80’s, I read Wallace Stegner’s All the Little Live Things, which was published in 1967 and set in that decade. Despite being an admirer of his work, I wasn’t impressed. I found his main character, Joe Allston, a retired literary agent pushing sixty and living with his wife in the hills near Palo Alto, California, to be tiresome. How would I describe Joe? How about crabby, curmudgeonly, crotchety, bitter, brooding, acerbic, opinionated, argumentative? Yes, any one of those will do, because they all describe Joe.

But then I just finished The Spectator Bird, published in 1976, which returns to the story of Joe and his wife Ruth. Ten years have passed and Joe is now knocking on the door of seventy. But he is the same old Joe (see above). He hasn’t changed, but I have. While Joe is ten years older, I am now thirty years older than when I first met him in All the Little Live Things.

As that great philosopher Muhammad Ali once said, “The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.” I was older than twenty when I met Joe and I am older than fifty now, but the principle still applies. Furthermore, I have gained twenty years on him, and though he and I couldn’t be described as soul mates, I do have a better understanding and greater tolerance of him. Some – not all – but some of what he says and believes now makes sense to me.

One of the things that makes me more tolerant is that Joe had a rough childhood (as did Stegner) and I don’t think I originally made enough allowance for that fact. He is also unable to come to terms with the death of his only child twenty years earlier, who was described as an over age beach bum who died either due to an accident or suicide. Part of Joe’s grief can be traced to the fact that he and his son were in constant conflict and he feels that he was not a good father and thus was partly responsible for his rebellious son’s death.

Furthermore, Joe is not aging gracefully. He thinks to himself at one point that “I am just killing time till time gets around to killing me.” His dark outlook on life is partly due to a heart problem and the pain he experiences from the onset of rheumatoid arthritis, but it is also because he feels that he has lived an empty life. He is both retrospective and introspective; he broods about the past and the present – and the future.

Joe feels that he has been more spectator (see title) than actor in his life and in one of his introspective moods he muses to himself:

“As for Joe Allston, he has been a wisecracking fellow traveler in the lives of other people, and a tourist in his own. There has not been one significant event in his life that he planned. He has gone downstream like a stick, getting hung up in eddies and getting flushed out again, only half understanding what he floated past, and understanding less with every year. He knows nothing that posterity needs to be told about.”

That last sentence is a reference to his wife wanting him to write his memoirs. After all, he was an agent for some of the most notable writers of the day. And most important, she thinks that it will keep his mind active and alert and will help cure him of his depression.

Joe is intelligent, of course, and he isn’t always a gloomy Gus. When he is in the mood he can be charming and witty. Here is what Joe thinks about the idea of writing his memoir:

“… it is one thing to examine your life and quite another to write it. Writing your life implies that you think it worth writing. It implies an arrogance, or confidence, or compulsion to justify oneself, that I can’t claim. Did Washington write his memoirs? Did Lincoln, Jefferson, Shakespeare, Socrates? No, but Nixon will, and Agnew is undoubtedly hunched over his right now.”

All I have done is to set the stage. Much of the story is told in flashback to 1954 when Joe and Ruth took a trip to Denmark. They went there for an extended stay in an attempt to escape the heartbreak of the recent death of their son and to give Joe a chance to rest and recuperate from an illness. Why Denmark? Well, that is because his mother emigrated to America from there when she was only sixteen. Joe never knew his father. And because his only child and his mother have both died, he says that he has neither descendant nor ancestor.

He and his wife went to Denmark with the idea that they might locate the house in which his mother had lived. They did; and the plot thickens. Joe is a complicated character with a complex past, but in Denmark he met his match, a countess whose character and past was even more complex.

With the publication of this book, Stegner was at the peak of his popularity. The Spectator Bird won a National Book Award and his previous novel, Angle of Repose, won a Pulitzer.

Finally, Joe was right about Nixon and Agnew. Nixon did write his memoir, more than one, in fact, and so did Agnew. Of course, their memoirs were written after both had to resign in disgrace from their respective offices. Agnew even wrote a novel, The Canfield Affair. I have never read it, but the blurb here on Goodreads says: “This book is about a Vice President who was destroyed by his own ambition." I know it isn’t autobiographical because Agnew was destroyed by his greed.

Joe would have had something to say about that.

[Debbie W. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why I chose to listen to this audiobook:
1. I really enjoyed listening to other audiobooks written by Wallace Stegner, so I added this one to my WTR list;
2. after listening to a Louise Erdrich novel, I was in the mood for a Stegner story;
3. it was readily available on Hoopla; and,
4. August 2022 is my personal "As the Spirit Moves Me Month".

Praises:
1. as a more "mature" reader (at least, age-wise 😉); I can always appreciate Stegner's writing style which usually focuses on venerable characters involved in long-term marriages. In this case, MC Joe Allston, and his wife, Ruth, are at an age where they start thinking about their own mortality, especially when a close friend gets terminally ill. I really felt their aches and pains (literally and figuratively) that life threw at them;
2. I enjoyed listening to Joe and Ruth reminisce about their time spent in Denmark 20 years earlier, which was shortly after their son's death (accident or suicide?) as Joe reads aloud from his journals written during that time period. From these journals (and a mysterious postcard sent to Joe), we learn about their time spent with Countess Astrid and her bizarre familial background. It's obvious that Joe is hiding something from Ruth, and I'm afraid to find out what it is; and,
3. narrator Edward Hermann does an exceptional job!

Niggle:
1. Several literary references went over my head; and,
2. although I enjoyed spending time with Joe and Ruth, I'm afraid that these characters won't be as memorable as I hoped they would be.

Overall Thoughts:
Since my hubby and I honeymooned in Denmark back in 1988, it was fun hearing about familiar landmarks.
Although this was a good story, I preferred Stegner's Crossing to Safety and Angle of Repose a lot more.

Recommendation?
For readers who are 50+ and enjoy a slow-paced, character-driven novel. Also, a must-read for Wallace Stegner fans!

[Jim Fonseca · Rating 4 out of 5]

They say that as we approach old age, some look back with satisfaction and contentment about the life path they followed, and some reflect with regret and guilt, and, in hindsight, wish they had followed other paths to supposedly greener pastures. Approaching 70, our narrator is squarely in the latter category.

Despite the narrator's and his wife's relatively good health, an accomplished career as a literary agent, and a suburban villa an hour from San Francisco, he is filled with guilt for driving away his only child. Their son became a 'surfer bum' and drowned.

The narrator is in full whine looking at his body in the bathtub as 'a museum of dereliction.' He regrets 'the affair not taken' on a trip long ago to Denmark in search of his mother's ancestral home.

The book was written in the mid-1970s and the narrator has a lot of unfavorable things to say about the carefree lifestyle of the flower children and their disrespect for the elderly. Does the phrase crotchety old man come to mind? No wonder he drove his son away.

There's not much plot other than what we might call a genealogical mystery as he finds things out about his Danish ancestors that he didn't really want to know.

It's a story of how seniors reflect back on life and wonder 'who's next?' while those around them drop off one by one. His wife is a saint, putting up with his determined crotchetyness, so the book is also a tender love story of an aging couple.

All that being said, it's a good book. I gave it a '4' and I might be being stingy because I see strings of '5s' as I cursor through my friends' reviews on GR. Spectator Bird won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1977. In a way it's a manual about the aging process in America, akin to two others I have reviewed: Everyman and My Father's Tears and Other Stories.



Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was a novelist and a historian. Many of his 25 books, fiction and non-fiction, are about the American West. He’s been called things like ‘the Dean of Western Writers.’ His three best-known works are, in order, Angle of Repose, Crossing to Safety and Big Rock Candy Mountain. I’ve read and reviewed the first two of those and both are truly excellent and among my favorites. If you take GR ratings into account, note that Angle of Repose with a GR rating of 4.25 based on almost 150,000 ratings is truly exceptional.

Photo from azquotes.com

[Revised 6/6/23, shelves and picture added]

[Zoeytron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joe Allston, a 69 year old retired literary agent, has immersed himself in a self-imposed old age state of mind.  Life lessons have soured Joe.  Dissatisfied with his life and the things he hasn't accomplished, the chip on his shoulder is approaching the size of Mount Rushmore.  He feels his body winding down, "sees" that he is becoming invisible to younger people.  A waylaid postcard from an old friend arrives, and spurs him to reread a journal that he kept from many years ago.  Ah, the sympathetic ear of one's journal.  The author's insights are keen, and I look forward to reading more of his works.  

Getting old is like standing in a long, slow line.  You wake up out of the shuffle and torpor only at those moments when the line moves you one step closer to the window.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ever notice how, on rare occasions, certain writers really stand out for their ability to capture the subtle and complex ways of folks? It’s usually a reason to celebrate since these insights are there for us to imbibe. But it may be a source of distress if what’s revealed is a difficult truth. For me, Wallace Stegner is that sort of author, and this book is one I celebra-hate. Actually, hate is too strong a word, even when it’s combined with a good thing. I should say I felt twinges of disappointment when recognizably human elements in the main character’s make-up prevented a greater happiness. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not looking for slants a la Hallmark. I just feel sad about opportunities missed, especially when those doing the missing are characters whose innermost thoughts I’ve been absorbing with interest.

I’ve told you about the malaise. I might as well mention a big reason for it (as long as I’m careful not to reveal more than the back cover does). Joe Allston, a crusty 69-year-old former literary agent, and his kindhearted wife Ruth live a rather isolated life in northern California. They had lost their son tragically in surf-boarding accident 20 some years prior. To make matters worse, Joe felt there had been unresolved father-son issues when it happened.

The story begins as a postcard arrives from an old friend from a trip Joe and Ruth had taken to Denmark. The extended stay there was, in part, meant as therapy to take their minds off their then-fresh and constant grief. It also allowed Joe to explore the small town where his mother had lived before shipping off to the states and having him. As chance would have it, they stayed with a Danish countess whose diminished circumstances required her to take in boarders. Astrid (the countess) was the one who sent the postcard. This sparked memories of the trip that Joe pursued even more by breaking out a journal he kept at the time. Ruth asked that he read it aloud so that she, too, could take the trip back in time.

The first entries in the journal were set on the boat ride over. They had met an older couple, which prompted Joe to write descriptively about their ilk, and about censorious people in general.

They sit in lace-curtained parlors and tsk-tsk on an indrawn breath, they know every unwanted pregnancy in town sooner than the girl does, they want English teachers in Augustana College fired for assigning A Farewell to Arms, they wrote the Volstead Act.

Once they arrived, the focus of the journal shifts to the countess. They learn that despite her elegance and good breeding, she was getting the cold shoulder from society types. Her estranged husband, unbeknownst to her when they’d been together, had been a Nazi sympathizer. Later into their stay they learn something else that explains the perceptions of her peers, but it would be a spoiler to say any more. I will say that you may or may not buy into this revelation. I decided that for me it was just a side issue, and that the far more important part of the book was Joe’s exploration of self.

This self under the scope was very thoroughly studied. Joe’s observational skills as a “spectator”, passively taking things in, were keen enough to recognize himself as a spectator, passively taking things in. This quote was telling:

I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine the life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?

Relatedly, Joe seemed to regret his apparent detachment:

That is the way the modern temper would read me. Babbitt, the man who in all his life never did one thing he really wanted to. One of those Blake was scornful of, who controlled their passions because their passions are feeble enough to be controlled. One of those Genteel Tradition characters whose whole pale ethos is subsumed in an act of renunciation.

But might there have been times, thinking of what the journal hinted at but omitted, when passions were less tepid? And might actions or inactions in the face of these be even more defining in his life? See, I know the answers to these questions, and the only way you will is to read this masterful book.

While I don’t rate this one quite as high as Angle of Repose or Crossing to Safety, that’s a standard few, if any, can surpass. Stegner was just about Joe’s age when he wrote it, and advancing years were a theme. As sour as old Vin de Joe had become, I’d have preferred a cheerier example to live by. Beyond that, lines like this are beginning to hit home:

[...] I felt an uneasy adolescent peeking from behind my old-age make-up, as if I were a sixteen-year-old playing Uncle Vanya in the high school play [...]

Hey, but at least I wouldn’t call my face a “spiderweb with eyes.” Not yet, anyway.

Quibbles aside, here’s the bottom line: Wallace Stegner is the real deal. With him, it’s insight and great writing on every page. I hope you all do yourselves the favor of his wisdom and art.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wonder what I would have made of this book and Joe Allston if my younger self had read it when it was initially published. I wonder if I could have understood exactly where Joe was in life and how inescapable looking back is from that vantage point, or how poignant. Joe is 70 years old and looking old age squarely in the face. He hasn’t lost it yet, but he sees it deteriorating and he watches his friends, sometimes his age or a little older, faring worse than he does or dying. It makes him crotchety and cross, and it makes him reflective.

I drifted into my profession as a fly lands on flypaper, and my monument is not in the libraries, or men’s minds, or even in the paper-recycling plants, but in those files. They are the only thing that proves I ever existed. So far as I can see, it is bad enough sitting around watching yourself wear out, without putting your only immortal part into mothballs.

Spurred by a postcard from an old friend, Joe begins to remember a trip taken to Denmark after the death of his only son, and as the story of that trip unfolds, we get a chance to see who Joe was, who he has become, and at least part of the road he has taken between those two places in life.

There is a feeling part of us that does not grow old. If we could peel off the callus, and wanted to, there we would be, untouched by time, unwithered, vulnerable, afflicted and volatile and blind to consequence, a set of twitches as beyond control as an adolescent’s erections.

I found a kinship with Joe, this man with more life behind than in front of him but with no desire to exit the play before the final curtain. I understood his sorrow over both the present and the past; his respect for the life he lived and his nostalgia for the life he might have had.

I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather’s that you can’t paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine the life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives?...And what if you’re the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?

Maybe every man nearing seventy asks himself these questions. I certainly have. I suspect Stegner did. I’m fairly sure this is a book I came to at the right time in life. It took me a long time to make it here, but the timing was perfect.

[Bianca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Am I allowed to declare my undying love for Stegner's writing after only reading two of his books? Is it presumptuous, hasty? I do not care. I love his writing!

The Spectator Bird is narrated by Joe Alston, a depressed, morose, seventy-year-old, retired literary agent. He lives with his devoted wife, Ruth, in Northern California. Their life is quiet and he seems to be happier with just staying home reading rather than socialising.

There's a more exciting, distracting episode relating to the couple's visit to Denmark twenty years prior when Joe attempted to track down his roots of his Danish-born mother, while recuperating from illness. They rent a room in the house of mysterious countess Astrid, a striking woman, down on her luck. While spending time with her, they find out about her family's strange history and a few other things.

The indignities of ageing, long marriage, grief, depression, making choices vs just falling into things are some of the prevalent themes of this relatively quiet novel.

This novel was published forty-two years ago. It aged really well because of its universal themes.

The Spectator Bird is literary fiction of the highest calibre, the type that makes me think "This is why I read".

I forgot to mention, this audiobook was narrated by the incredible Edward Herrmann, who gets a million stars.

[Jennifer nyc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stegner’s protagonist and narrator, Joe, feels authentic and lets you in. He’s sensitive, intelligent and funny. He’s also quite a curmudgeon. A 69-year-old married white man in the year 1972, in the California Hills. The novel is specific and small. Our journey takes place inside of him, and I often wanted to break free. Stegner is gifted, but I found Joe’s pain confining. The confinement, however, was exquisitely constructed. There were gorgeous moments, like when his wife, Ruth, first asked him to read his journal out loud, an entry from a trip together, long ago. They had lost their son, and in attempt to alleviate Joe’s depression, visited Denmark, the birth place of his mom.

This is where the story picks up. The couple befriends a countess with a sordid story of her own. And both Ruth and Joe fall deeply in love with her.

The ending chapters swept me away. These contained the treasure at the end of an arduous journey, and it was well worth the wait. I felt melted, shapeless and quivering with sorrow and love. It also felt like a natural culmination of all we - the characters and the reader - had endured, and it was one of the richest reading experiences I’ve ever had.

National Book Award Winner for Fiction, 1977.

[Lisa (NY) · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Spectator Bird is a beautifully written novel. What I loved most was Stegner's thoughtful, profound portrayal of a mature, complicated, loving relationship between a married couple. To steal from The Troggs, Wallace Stegner, you make my heart sing!

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark. But Ruth is right. It is something--it can be everything--to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle".

That's the best description of a long marriage I've ever read. This is the story of a long marriage, with its ups and downs and highs and lows, surviving the death of their only son, the aches and pains of getting older, watching good friends get sick and die, move into care homes, and ultimately knowing that "the line forms on the left" as Joe says. A postcard from an old friend in Denmark leads them into reminiscences of a trip 20 years before, and Joe's realization that choices have to be made and lived with, whether you're a spectator of life or not.

This was a magnificent novel. It's Wallace Stegner, what can I say?

[Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤ · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Nobody in the universe ever promised you anything. Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of a life amount not to wisdom but to scar tissue and callus." 

Thus muses Joe, a curmudgeonly man nearing 70, as he reflects back on his life. 

A postcard arrives from Denmark, which has Joe digging out some old journals. His wife, seeing them, asks Joe to read them to her. Together they delve into their time, years ago, spent in Denmark after the death of their son.

This book is beautifully written and engaging. I'm not a lover of relationship stories but this one sucked me right in. Joe is highly intelligent and I loved his reflections and how he weighed past choices in the light of where he is now. 

This was my first Stegner and it will not be my last!

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

An observant soul, that spectator bird.

Joe Allston is a literary agent, perhaps polishing brighter stars. If he was in Denmark, one or more poets might call him “an attendant lord.” So it is not just chance that takes Allston in fact to Denmark. Well, it’s a postcard actually, a postcard that arrives now that Allston is retired. The postcard is from a countess he once knew in Denmark and it gets him to rummage through his boxed memories for a journal he kept of those days. His wife, Ruth, who was there in Demark with him, shared Denmark with him, wants him to read his journal to her; just a bit, every night. The reader immediately feels Allston’s discomfort.

A bit awkward that literary device, but it gets us from the Allston’s home in California to that time in Denmark twenty years before. So there’s plot(s) there, secrets to unfold; but, frankly, some of plot is kind of strained, as if Stegner felt an obligation to his readers to provide a running story. A necessary evil, maybe, but one that allows that spectator bird to, well, spectate.

Stegner says it’s like what Willa Cather once said, that you can’t paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. But, Allston muses, what if you’re the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?

There is much self-reflection here that will appear familiar to those entering their twilight years:

He says that when he is asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man with something the matter with him.

Allston considers each body part as it hurts or is otherwise compromised, including with some self-deprecation and thankfully no more specificity: That too. Hail and Farewell. But it is the diffused pain that he suspects is rheumatoid arthritis that sends him to the Britannica - this being a time before the internet – because, he says, the unexamined disease is not worth having. And, I liked this about Joe Allston:

The encyclopedia did not mention bourbon as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, either because the learned man who wrote the article did not deal in the obvious or because he wasn’t that learned after all.

The contrived plot was not without its benefits. In particular, there is a meeting and lovely dialogue with Karen Blixen. All Danes accounted for.

But at its heart this is a story about an old married couple, and how they survive things. How they share. At one point they are having a conversation about another couple, the husband dying. And Joe Allston, who only appears heartless, starts:

”Well, we don’t have to for a while.”
“No. We’re lucky, we really are.”
“I always thought I was.”
“See?” she said. “You really can be nice.”
“Given provocation.”

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joe Allston, a retired literary agent, is an observer: of his past, of the current society, of life in general. He is troubled by the death of his son and the tense relationship they had had. His body is showing signs of age and so are the morals and norms he values. He has regrets, guilt, and pain, both physical and mental. Yet, he is engaging, intelligent, and known to be humorous. He and his wife have a loving, caring, and enviable relationship. Is he a curmudgeon, a grump. just an old crab? Unlike some reviewers, I don't think so. I believe his "spectating" is extremely realistic, especially of a 68-year old retiree. His musings are revealed in his diaries and reluctantly to his wife. He has difficulty discussing his innermost thoughts - not unusual in my opinion. His persona may not be one of joviality but it is not that of a crank.

This 1977 National Book Award winner is the third book I have read by Stegner. Each book demonstrates his masterful understanding of people. Each book has completely unique characters and storylines. The only similarities among his books are the beautiful dialogue, the astute insights, and the captivating stories. How I wish he could have continued writing forever.

[Laysee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had wanted to read another novel by Wallace Stegner since “Crossing to Safety”. “The Spectator Bird” lived up to expectations and not because it won the US National Book Award for Fiction in 1977. Even though it was written almost forty years ago, the relevance of the issues it dealt with shone through the pages with contemplative resonance.

Set mostly in Denmark, “The Spectator Bird” centered on Joe Allston, a 69-year-old retired literary agent, his wife (Ruth), and their summer friendship with a Danish countess who had fallen from grace. The arrival of a postcard from Astrid Wredel-Krarup stirred up memories of a “therapy” trip the Allstons had undertaken twenty years ago, and evoked feelings that mattered to Joe because the interlude was "that irruption of the irrational, that reversion into adolescence". The narration was interspersed with journal entries Joe had made from that trip as he read it aloud to his wife (at her insistence).

Perhaps, this novel would seem drearily depressing to individuals in the prime of their lives. It speaks candidly about the dignity (or indignity) of growing old and the realities of a long marriage. People who have been blessed with an enduring marriage may be able to identify with this observation, “After forty-five years we can still, if we let ourselves, bristle and bump one another around like a pair of stiff-legged dogs.” Additionally, there is sobering reflection on aging: “It is not arthritis and the other ailments...It is just the general comprehension that nothing is building, everything is running down, there are no more chances for improvement." Brutal realization for disgruntled individuals such as Joe for whom it seemed life happened. During the Great Depression, the toss was between becoming a "broke talent" or a "talent broker". A significant personal loss deepened his sense of helplessness and found him having to “scratch dead leaves” over what he did not wish to see.

What I found most touching was the way the Allstons negotiated the revelations that emerged from reading the journal entries. Half the time I read with trepidation the thoughts and feelings that Joe had no way of censoring while reading without escaping the intuitive appraisal of his wife. A quiet grimace communicated unacknowledged needs and fears. “The Spectator Bird” is about honesty in intimacy. It is about choices. Joe said it well, “It has seemed to me that my commitments are often more important than my impulses or my pleasures, and that even when my pleasures or desires are the principal issue, there are choices to be made between better and worse, bad and better, good and good.” Each choice is made with "a big component of pain".

Steger has such an impeccable way with words that are at times delighfully laced with self-deprecating humor. His language has a penetrating quality that can unnerve the reader and yet one has to keep on reading. The Allstons aside, the novel has an intriguing story to tell about the Countess and the incredulous circumstances leading to her ostracism from Danish society. Great book!

[Blaine DeSantis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have had a bunch of Wallace Stegner's works in my library for a few years but never got around to choosing one. So, about a week ago I walked over to the library and this book sort of jumped out at me. And so at age 63, an age I think is appropriate for reading this book, I settled in for what was a very worthwhile and thought-provoking week of reading.
The man writes beautifully and this book touches on things that I think cannot be appreciated until one hits these Golden Years of life. We have a book that discusses aging, health, relationships, as well as lives and past loves (or at least past desires). Even though written in the 1970's the book does not feel dated and the feelings that Stegner writes about are as fresh and worthy of review now. Maybe it is because I retired rather early, but I have spent quite a bit of time reviewing my own life and there is something about taking the time to contemplate ones life that makes this a perfect book for a retired individual to read.
If it is so great then why not a 5*****? Well, for me it is the fact that while it is a part of the story the entire genetics portion of the book just did not really ring true and was just hard to fathom. There were questions that were left unanswered and so for that single reason it dropped a star in my opinion. However, for me this was a very fine book. I read much of it to my wife who also enjoyed things, and the book made me realize that the time has come for me to not spend quite as much time thinking and sometimes lamenting the past, but that at age 63 there is a whole lot of future that I need to continue to live - even though I have so many of those same aches and pains that the books lead character Joe Allston suffers from.

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed every minute I spent with this book. Every line spoke to me. The lines had me alternately thinking or smiling.

I share a lot with the central character of the novel. I believe this is why I relate to the book as much as I do. The book is about Joe Allston, actually not just about him, but about his wife (Ruth) too, about the couple as a pair, about their relationship and their respective attitudes. The year is 1974. He is sixty-nine years old and very much aware of the fact that he is approaching old age. Health concerns trouble him. He is retired. Husband and wife have settled down in a rural community in California, offering the peace of countryside living and only an hour’s distance from the intellectual community at Stanford. They have lived in NYC and have traveled extensively. Literature is an integral part of who they are. Joe’s mother was of Danish descent.

The story flips back and forth between the present,1974, and the past, 1954. In 1954 Joe and Ruth traveled to Denmark for several months; ostensibly, Joe was recuperating from myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle. Beside this, their son had died in a surfing accident. Now, in the present, Joe is reading to Ruth the journals he wrote on that trip, and they are talking, finally talking about what they have not been able to speak of before.

The book is about one’s thoughts as one nears seventy. It is about family relationships and guilt and misgivings and about accepting that how you feel you ought to be is perhaps not how you can be. There is a lot here about daring to voice one’s innermost thoughts. The book is about connection to others. Look at the title. Are you a “spectator-bird”, observing others at a distance, or are you one who lets others come close?

Before retirement, Joe had been a literary agent, making it natural that authors and books are intermingled in the telling of the story, but not in the sense of name-dropping. Instead, characters and events in well-known books are used as reference points; if you have read the book you know the kind pf person Joe or Ruth are speaking of, understand their train of thought and catch the underlying humor. Nothing is explained; readers must themselves figure out what is inferred. If you have read the book you will understand. If you haven’t you won’t!

Cultural differences, particularly the Scandinavian lifestyle in comparison to the American, is amusingly and insightfully drawn.

The details are perfect—from the lack of adequate illumination in European hotels to the experience of traveling on a boat in a violent storm to the behavior of a Siamese cat to the tone of a Danish dinner party compared to its American counterpart to how a husband and wife married for many years communicate both verbally and non-verbally.

I very much like how the story ends. I like the choice Joe made in the fifties. I like seeing where he is today having made that choice twenty years earlier.

The book does not go off on tangents. In tone, it is low-key. It has historical underpinnings of both the 1950s and the 1970s, that is to say the years after the Second World War and the Hippie 70s.

Edward Herrmann’s narration of the audiobook is fantastic. There is not a question of my rating his performance with anything but five stars. He knows when to pause. He never over-dramatizes. He captures exactly how this couple would have spoken to each other. The speed is perfect, and every word is easily heard.

This is a really good book and the audiobook is extremely well read. I do think it will appeal to some readers more than others. The words underlined in the second paragraph indicate what kind of person the book will appeal to most.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wallace Stegner's The Spectator Bird brings the return of curmudgeon Joe Allston from All the Little Live Things. This companion book is more tightly scripted, and the story is both introspective and retrospective. In it Stegner, through 69 year old Joe, reflects on growing old and death and quietly celebrates long-term marriage.

As I approach my 60th year I can empathize with Joe's feelings about friends who are failing and the ups and downs, joys and solidarity of my 35 year-long marriage.

With the unexpected arrival of a postcard from a Danish friend Joe begins to think 20 years into the past. He is motivated to pull out his journals from the trip he and his wife took to Denmark at that time, and at Ruth's request begins to read them aloud. Stegner uses this device to move back and forth between the Allstons' current life in rural California--suffering bad news about a neighbor, dealing with storm damage, and managing an unexpected visitor--to 1950's Denmark and their entanglement with Astrid, a Danish countess, and her family. (In the 1970's when this novel was published this technique was relatively novel.)

It is here that we get a good look at the Allstons' marriage -- the survival of the death of their son, their ability to communicate with just a look or gesture, their gentle care of each other, their sustaining each other as their friends age and die, and the resolution of a long-held worry.

"It is something--it can be everything--to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle."

As with all of Stegner's works the writing is exquisite, the descriptions of nature are beautifully rendered, wry humor is interspersed throughout, and there are true and perceptive looks into the human heart.

Published 1976

[Lorna · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Spectator Bird was a beautiful and complex narrative about the lives of Joe and Ruth Allston. Joe has just retired from his career as a literary agent in New York City. He and Ruth are living in a remote cottage about an hour from San Francisco. Joe at age sixty-nine has been plagued with health problems unique to the aging process. Concerned about him becoming depressed since he is no longer working, Ruth has encouraged to go through his many papers and manuscripts to determine what he many want to preserve. It seems that Joe Allston has happened on three spiral notebooks that he kept when he and Ruth returned to Denmark twenty years ago after the death of their son so Joe could research his mother's roots. Spurred on by a postcard received from a Danish Countess that he and Ruth spent a lot of time with and developed a friendship, albeit with complications. It is in this process that Joe remembers when the Countess took them to visit Karen Blixen. Joe retrieves the photograph that Ruth took of the author as she hosted them for a few hours in her beautiful garden as they all enjoyed the conversation and an al fresco picnic. It is these three journals that give much of the thrust to the narrative. Each night after dinner, Joe and Ruth would become comfortable as Joe read more and more pages from the notebooks, revealing their lives at that time. At one point, Ruth asks Joe if he recognizes them in the narrative or does it seem like it is happening to strangers. The novel jumps back and forth between these time frames. This includes dark themes of postwar Europe and the ideas rooted in race and the purity of bloodlines, eugenics. The writing of Wallace Stegner is excellent. I have always loved keen eye for detail. There is a lot of humanity that springs from these pages. It is a book about introspection and has the feeling of an older, now wiser spectator, as he becomes flooded with memories finally vindicating him of his past. A fabulous and moving book.

"I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint with what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine the life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?"

[Left Coast Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Stegner books I've read previously tend to be long-winded, so the tight, compact ball of yarn that is The Spectator Bird was a refreshing break from tradition. To belabor this metaphor still further, it was interesting to pull out the thread and see all the bright colors, with an unpredictable pattern keeping it interesting. The very center of this may have been a dull gray but it was fun getting there.

The book, to my surprise, was mostly set in Denmark, split between Copenhagen and the next major island south. I had thought my reading forays into that small nation had come to a close, so it was a small thrill to hear a writer of Stegner's talent reeling off place names like Havnegade and Kongens Nytorv that actually mean something to me. "The sun has burrowed into the overcast after one look at Denmark," he writes, which makes me believe he's actually been there. The rest of the book was set in an affluent neighborhood adjacent to Stanford University, and honestly this sounds pretty autobiographical. Meet Wallace Stegner / Joe Alston -- though only about seventy, it seems that he's been falling apart for twenty years or so. When we meet him he is gray, tottering, achy, no longer a force in the world and plenty angry about it.

Or so it seems. Much of this book is designed to keep the reader wondering whether his curmudgeonliness is an act or not.

Crucifixion can be discussed philosophically until they start driving in nails. Young, middle-aged or getting old, Joe Allston has always been full of himself, uncertain, dismayed, dissatisfied with his life, his country, his civilization, his profession, and himself. He has always been hungry for some continuity and assurance and sense of belonging, but has never had ancestors or descendents or place in the world.

Well, I suppose we all feel that way from time to time, but the trick is to acknowledge this is normal and human, ride it out and move on. It's something Allston struggles to do in this book.

While I may be inclined to a greater level of happiness than Stegner/Allston, we seem to have a lot in common. He was politically liberal but personally conservative, in the sense of feeling a strong sense of personal responsibility for those around him and not yielding to every temptation. The book is really an examination of love and marriage. Falling in love takes time and sacrifice, whereas feeling like you're falling in love can happen several times per day. You make peace with it or you don't.

Joe did.

[Cathrine ☯️ · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 ★ Rated Ɱ for mature reader
“He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man with something the matter with him.”

Exploring the road not taken, the what ifs that rob us of happiness and contentment by fertilizing regret.
Written 9 years after All the Little Live Things, Joe Alston is now 70 and pondering the indignities of aging, loss, and choices made earlier in life that determined which directions he went.
A postcard brings back memories that prompt him and his wife to revisit a time they traveled to Denmark. Something happened but Ruth has never been sure exactly what and he is thinking life has passed him by—that he was more spectator than participant. Clarification and reckoning has come due. It starts with reading Joe’s journal together at bedtime.

Both books were nominated for awards and this one was the winner. But I enjoyed reading its precursor more as the Danish segments here came off a bit disconnected from the story that seemed to be unfolding. Ultimately, as expected, it all came together. Stegner’s observations of married life are always sweet and sorrowful, profound and full of truth and wisdom.
As always, I loved where he took me in the end, as I have with all his stories.

[Cheri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published some 45 years ago in 1976, this seems like a timeless story of a marriage in many ways, while also having touchstones relating to specific eras, and the negative opinions of many of those being shared by Joe Allston, a retired literary agent throughout. This is, at the heart of the story, a story of a marriage, the allowances made, the secrets kept from each other along the way in order to maintain a reasonably happy marriage, and the memories made along the way.

Joe is no longer young, and is feeling a bit betrayed by his body no longer being as limber or healthy as it once was. His family has dwindled in size. He’s lost both of his parents, and his only son. He never enjoyed his work, helping others hone their gifts, watching them be appreciated with no credit given for his help getting them there. And now it’s too late to begin again, to undo what has been done.

When Joe receives a postcard from an old friend, he begins to revisit his old journals from years before, including his trip to Denmark, his mother’s birthplace, in an attempt to learn more about his mother’s life before he was born. He reads these old journals to his wife, Ruth, at her request, somewhat reluctantly, it seems - at least at first.

Slowly, the story of this trip is revealed as he shares his journal with Ruth. It is a timeless story. There is an honest and gentle sharing of feelings about that time they can finally, freely share about their marriage, and thoughts about the ‘what-ifs’ that could have been.

’...after a second or two in which we looked at each other with that baffled, stubborn expression that people who have been long time married often wear when they are reading each other's minds, I began reading again. My problem was the opposite of what I said it was. In our relationship with Astrid Wredel-Krarup, and in the recollections that the diary brought back, I wasn't quite spectator enough.’

A contemplative story of the journey of life, memories, age, and the relationships formed along the way. The gift of offering forgiveness to others, as well as oneself, perhaps especially in marriage.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

After discussion with Bonnie and Allie, I realize I projected my own lived experience onto this couple. I haven't been in a long-term marriage, but my parents have been married more than 50 years, and their dynamic - even now - is sexy as hell.

When reading about Joe and Ruth's rhythms and responsibilities, faithfulness and emotional bond, I just assumed that solid foundation upheld a long-term experience of sexual health. I thought they seemed a loving, aging couple. But as I spoke with my buddy readers, I realized there isn't a single scene of the two making love, or even touching in a way that feels erotic. And at a pivotal moment in the story (no spoilers) there's a complete absence of the sort of passionate choosing that makes for a healthy partnership.

I assumed Joe and Ruth were like Ed and Sandi, but they're not. And this makes a depressing book feel so much sadder, in retrospect. Yes, they were "two birds" looking down at life from the rafters, tending to one another in practical ways. But sitting and reading with someone every night, hosting dinner parties together and looking after one another's health: these things make two people good friends, not lovers. Hard to believe I totally didn't see it! I assumed passion was in the mix because that's my mental model for marriage, even though it's not in the pages of this book.

See? This is why buddy reads are a good idea. Our discussion helped me view this relationship through the lens of patriarchy, the expectations on women to caretake and to excuse the ways their husbands take them for granted.

Bonnie points out how Ruth is Joe's Giving Tree, nurturing him while he just keeps taking, and taking.

She's right. I hope Stegner writes another book that paints Ruth as a newly widowed protagonist, courted by an elderly neighbor who helps her know what it feels like to be desired, pursued and chosen for reasons other than comfort and convenience. I'd read that novel.

Book/Song Pairing (stolen from Queen B): Tolerate It (Taylor Swift)

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sartre wrote: We are our choices.

At a time of the year when many people of varying ages take stock, Stegner’s story of ageing Joe Allston was especially poignant. Whatever your age, we’ve all had those pivotal moments in life when we chose one fork in the road over the other, and go on to either live with regret, or relief. Even those who feel they’ve lived uneventful lives have, at some point, actively made decisions that altered everything forever.

I sometimes get the feeling my whole life happened to somebody else.

Stegner was a master at creating characters that feel utterly normal because nothing much really happens to them. They’re quietly despondent and repressed. They don’t usually blow up, but accept the finality of the circumstances. It’s not the most inspirational message, but it sure is realistic.

It comes as shock to realize that I am just killing time ’til time gets around to killing me.

Other than a brief digression into a bizarre “pure race” and incest side story, this novel is subtle and beautifully written.

[Betsy Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my third Stegner book, and I now love the man. I first met his protagonist Joe Allston in All the Little Live Things, the follow-up to this book, which ended in an earthquake. The Spectator Bird is much quieter but just as good a literary meal.

I finished this book just after attending my 50th high school reunion, and I could not have been better prepared to understand what Stegner grappled with and came to peace about in this National Book Award-winning novel. I came away from my reunion with a sweet sad happy sense that my life and even things that didn’t feel like choices at the time, but rather rejections, failures, and a hopeless inability to meet my own goals, were actually perfect choices—all leading to a life that I would not trade for any other. This is essentially what Stegner is writing about with such profound understanding in The Spectator Bird. I’m satisfied.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wallace Stegner defines the relationship between a long married couple, Joe Allston and his wife Ruth, so well it truly resonated with me. I loved how the story quietly unfolded. Narrator, Edward Herrmann read the characters beautifully in his mellow voice, which was a pleasure to listen to. It was a perfect marriage of book and narrator.

Here are quotes that I found meaningful:

"He has been a wisecracking fellow traveller in the lives of other people and a tourist in his own."

"Catching me with my feelings showing would give her power over me, as surely as if she had collected my nail pairings or tufts of my hair."

"The complexity of being married to a woman you dearly love and automatically resist. I inevitably evade her management. I even evade her sympathy and affection or meet them with my guard up."

"Ruth sleeps in the other bed like a tired dog and here I sit in my back breaking oriole's nest, wide awake in spite of the pill I took at eleven."

"In rejecting me, he [their son, Curtis] destroyed my compass. He pulled my plug. He drained me. He was the continuity my life and effort were spent to establish."

"Her face was a spider's web with eyes."

"Dressed and sweatered, but in slippers, I wandered into the living room and dug out the Britannica and looked up rheumatoid arthritis. The unexamined disease isn't worth having."

"Orion was coming to meet us, then he was entangled in the oak, then as we came into the open again he was free. The daffodils in the meadow were touched with pale nocturnal gold."

"But Ruth is right, it is something, it can be everything, to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below. A fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for. One who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle."

[Lynne King · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this book from page 1 to the end. Joe Alston, a nearly seventy-year old is one of these miserable and depressing individuals who nevertheless brings joy to one. He's a pretty astute guy but very aware of his own mortality. He's also one of those honourable men whom I always find so very endearing and his wife Ruth of forty years or so understands him very well indeed.

But it was the journals that had me entranced with this book and the fact that he read them to Ruth. To travel back in time to when these journals were written about Denmark and the countess Astrid. Now they were amazing.

An excellent book.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an extraordinarily strange book, and I don't mean in terms of plot - that was visible from a long way off. I mean in terms of the title - The Spectator Bird. Maybe it's a female perspective but I don't think the plot, or my reading of the protagonist supports the title; certainly Joe Allston considers himself a spectator in his own life. I suppose what jars me most is that women don't feel like that about themselves? I put a question mark because although I can speak for myself, I can only surmise, or guess how other women view their lives, but I don't think there are many, who would consider themselves to be outside-of, viewing their life?

I start with this because I realise, it makes it a little difficult for me to identify with Joe, and the central question: has his life been worthwhile? Has he done something with it? What I object to however, is specifically the inference: "has he done something important?" Men clearly view "important" in quite a different way to women - and that need for importance is all Stegner. I know from reading this article, that he was a man who needed to leave a mark. The journalist, David Gessner, in the article above says that Stegner hid how industrious he was because he also knew just how freakish it was. There is a list by Gessner - an outstanding output, of books, articles and more, for one particular year. Stegner was a man driven to prove himself and that is certainly present in his alter-ego, Joe.

That is the way the modern temper would read me. Babbit, the man who in all his life never did one thing he really wanted to . One of those Blake was scornful of, who controlled their passions because their passions are feeble enough to be controlled. One of those of Genteel Tradition characters whose whole pale ethos is subsumed in an act of renunciation. One who would grasp the handle but not the blade. Milquetoast. Homo castratus.

Yes, he really beats up on himself. I don't know if this is simply a man thing, or if it's to do with the decade 1909, or indeed the place where he was born. The contemporary story of the book is 1974, the foothills of San Francisco, when Joe is 69 and looks back to a holiday in Denmark, 20 years earlier in 1954.

I'm not one of those reviewers who want to detail all the plots and occurrences and characters in the book, I would rather focus on my reactions to it, what pleased and what didn't. My review so far, doesn't seem too supportive, but I think the other aspect of "strange" with which I opened the review is that this book touches on so many parts of my own life. I am crying with Joe and I am laughing with him also. And the relationship between Joe and his wife, Ruth is so warm and real, and so much how I see or would like to see my own relationship with my partner develop. I hardly know where to start with this book. I began with my reservations, and my reservations held to the very last page; because profoundly I see Joe as a hero. I don't see him as anything else. Exactly like Helen Graham in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, he does the right thing, and as he says to his beloved wife Ruth, there was no decision to be made. The circumstances quite simply forbade it.

And here I have to stop and realise that Joe is someone who did not jump into the great arena of passion and romantic love, and it's actually quite hard for me to understand his perspective of "what if?" What if I had done that? Hindsight makes everything beautifully clear doesn't it? And it's very easy to forget that in the moment, in that moment of deciding you have to turn away from a whole window of possibility and close it firmly. As a society we are driven by the ideals of romantic love - and some of us jump, and some of us don't. That is what this novel is really about. Joe believes he has missed something wonderful and yet he also understands profoundly; at the end of reading his diary with Ruth listening to every word; a development which she has insisted on; Joe comes to the realisation he has always had a wonderful life, and still has.

I have to mention this section which is so funny. I laughed and laughed and as I recall it now, I am laughing again. It also brings me back to "strange," because this book interconnects quite strangely with my life. My partner comes from an aristocratic Portuguese family; and when Joe describes the Grandmamá of the Rødding family in their "castle" at the great Øreybyslot estate, I am laughing because I recognise so many similarities. There seem to be few differences in these old European families, with their endogamy, stiff backs and immense pride.

She was so old she would have had to be dated by carbon 14. Conforming to the rule that old ladies should give up primary colors and return to the pastels of babyhood, she wore a dusty-pink jersey dress that hung on her like a sweater on a gate. She was thin and brittle. Veins and tendons stood out on the backs of her blotchy hands.

A couple of paragraphs later:

Manon and the countess jumped to help the servant get her into the chair at the head of the table. Supported by six hands, she teetered and sank, and went the last four inches with a bump. She clenched her claws on the chair arms while the servant lifted chair and all into place. Only then, her difficult entrance accomplished, she turned her cheek up to the countess, who bent and kissed it.

This whole section is too good to be missed - it is so well written. All the hesitations, the silent communications between the countess and Manon, between Joe and his wife, who semaphores him not to say things; the little baron, who is 7 and behaves as his breeding has taught him, and then Miss Weibull. '. . . group silences that go on for too long make me nervous. So, I said to Miss Weibull, most politely, "Aren't the lilacs marvelous?"
"Jeg taler ikke Engelsk," said Miss Weibull.'

I could read that whole section over and over again!

Here's an earlier bit from the same chapter; and it includes the repartee between husband and wife. They're being shown The Castle and have arrived at the library:

'Having no expertise in either horticulture or game management, and seeing them hover there trying not to hurry me, I put back the volume whose binding I had been admiring, and said, "These are impressive, but over my head. I've got other imperatives." Oh what? they said. So I plucked from the shelf a Goethe in German and read them the last line of Faust: "Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan." Manon managed to take that piece of japery as a compliment to her, and the countess gave me a snickering look that said Mr. Allston was sehr kavalier, and Ruth gave me another sort of look, asking me in effect who I thought I was, Little Lord Fauntleroy?'

The German translates as: "The Eternal Feminine draws us upward."

When you know the whole story that little sketch reverberates with humour and much more. It's very typical of the layers Stegner is so good at.

After I had read the section where Count Eigel Rødding explains the breeding programme that has made his estate the most forward and productive - in the whole world -as he suggests -
Oh! Eigel's archaeology museum - for my Geography degree, we were given a book about Tollund Man, The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved, and I recognised Stegner's description of the bog man instantly - which he uses symbolically at the beginning of the book. At the conclusion of this chapter Joe considers that Rødding's ancestors were very likely the ones doing the hanging whereas his were likely the ones sacrificed. Joe is obsessed with this question of what makes some men leaders and others less than? The Count's work of wanting to improve human DNA, continuing from where his famous father left off, is not so dissimilar from Joe's questions about himself.

And to pick up the earlier thought, I realised that this was not the first time I had read the part about genetic engineering. I guessed it had been used by an English teacher, or perhaps in an exam paper; Stegner is exactly the sort of writer that teachers love. Or maybe the American professor, who taught a course on the intersection between Literature and Environmental Studies - back in 1995 - maybe she chose it to demonstrate Stegner's place in the line that begins with Thoreau and Wendell Berry; it continues to John McPhee and includes many others - Willa Cather, Rachel Carson, Gretel Erhlich.

I wonder why she didn't choose lunch with Grandmamá?

I could go on for multiple more pages about the ways in which Stegner has influenced me - and un-beknown to me. I did not know that he was one of the great advocates for Environmental protection in the United States. He is one of the reasons, that the National Parks (worldwide) are in existence today, and it was only as I read this novel, the first of his that I have read (in full) that I see all the disparate ways in which he has profoundly touched me; the multiple energy ripples begin to fall into place. Yesterday I am at my quinta watering my trees, and I know that Stegner was one of those people directly influential in the choices I have made. So I read his novel, and I read about him and his life; and I know that he has had a profound impact on the values that many of us hold today. I salute you Wallace Stegner.

[Bonnie G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much to think about in this gorgeously written book!

The Spectator Bird surprised me throughout. I did not expect an ode to monogamy, a celebration of quiet contentment and trust over fire and wonder. It is kind of lovely, but also very much not. For me it is a trip to the theatre or a bit of gazing through the neighbors' window, never really having taken to quiet contentment and having found the joy of trust in non-romantic relationships to be enough for me.

The book gives us an aging couple, Joe and Ruth Allston, childless after the long-ago death of their only child (by accident or suicide, it is unclear.) Joe and Ruth are now living a quiet, seemingly lovely life in rural Northern California after years spent in NYC. Lovely life or no, Joe is depressed and mean. He is still grieving his son's long-ago death and his reckoning with the fact that he worked hard but got no real joy from his life as a literary agent and is unlikely to find joy now. Around him, friends and neighbors are failing and dying, and he is in pain from arthritis. His only solace is that he loves Ruth, who seems a not particularly bright but truly devoted and kind woman. He lives in fear she will see his flaws and his (really rather insignificant) secrets, and some illusion will be shattered. As if there are illusions to be shattered after more than 40 years together. When Joe receives a letter from a woman the couple met years ago on an extended trip to Denmark when healing after their son's death. Joe unearths journals he kept on the trip. Ruth asks him to read them aloud. It is clear Ruth has her reasons for this shared reading. There is some desire to examine their lives, a weird nostalgia, but something else seems to be going on, and it is clear that something else makes Joe nervous. As we go back in time with Joe and Ruth to relive that trip we know something is coming. Some of that something turned out to be not much of a surprise, but some of it most definitely was, at least for me.

Even with the tension, the book never loses an underlying hopefulness, and never wavers in its certainty that Joe and Ruth's commitment and sticktoitiveness are wonderful things. For this female reader in this century, it is clear how limited a life this was for women and how it was mostly just good for Joe. I want to talk about a couple of specific things that made me wince rather hard, but will do so below behind a spoiler tag.

Ruth seems forever grateful for Joe staying with her, never more than in the end after he confesses to having kissed another woman (just a kiss, and one he has felt bad about for years.) She is embarrassingly grateful he did not continue his dalliance and laments that she should not have tried to interfere with his infatuation with their Danish friend. That is problematic. Very. She also puts up with his consistent complaining and does so with good cheer and efforts to make his life happier. Joe expends no energy to make his life or hers more pleasant. It just seems like she would be better off without him, but she can't imagine herself as anything but this wife appendage. If she had some autonomy, she could have moved on and had a better run.

Also, the "other woman" was suspected of having had an incestuous relationship with an adult relative as a teen, and Joe goes on about how he finds it amazing she can even show her face, as if it would have been her fault if it had happened, as if she should be ashamed. I did not love Joe or the author as I was reading that, and I was thankful to not be a mid-20th-century woman.

The story was extremely engrossing, and the prose was magical. Some of this has not aged well, but it was written when it was written. My issues were really me bringing a modern sensibility to something written 50 years ago, and that is a silly thing to do. Still, it impacted the read for me. I may notch this up later after discussing this with my buddy readers Sarah and Allie on Sunday, but at first blush, I am going with a 4-star.

(Post buddy read meeting, I am staying at 4-stars, but this made for an amazing buddy read book! What a great conversation.)