Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

The electrifying portrait of an idealistic young man who is an unwilling witness to the changes in society and its values. Here is a book that captures the very essence of the 1960s and is at the same time as fresh today as when it was first published in 1965.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, American Fiction, Literature, American, Literary Fiction, France

348 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

People note American writer Mary Therese McCarthy for her sharp literary criticism and satirical fiction, including the novels The Groves of Academe (1952) and The Group (1963).

McCarthy studied at Vassar college in Poughkeepsie, New York and graduated in 1933. McCarthy moved to city of New York and incisively wrote as a known contributor to publications such as the Nation, the New Republic, and the New York Review of Books. Her debut novel, The Company She Keeps (1942), initiated her ascent to the most celebrated writers of her generation; the publication of her autobiography Memories of a Catholic Girlhood in 1957 bolstered this reputation.

This literary critic authored more than two dozen books, including the now-classic novel The Group , the New York Times bestseller in 1963.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McC...

Reviews

[Shawn Mooney (Shawn Breathes Books)]

Oh dear, less than 25 pages in I’m abandoning this. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been as repulsed by a protagonist as I am by the 19-year-old whiny, selfish, mother-abusing kid in this novel. Mary McCarthy is one of my favorite authors, but there’s no way I’m spending another page in this jerk’s head. In browsing archival Goodreads reviews, I stumbled upon someone’s great line, “I hated all the people he hated, but I hated him too.” Yup.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

An adolescent boy and his mother spend a winter living on the coast of Maine. It's a coming of age story, but laid over the context of the breakdown and sellout of American culture - the US at war in Vietnam and at war with itself. Modernization, tradition, and the death of nature are the overriding themes. A terrific story that puts the reader in the scene and in the times.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

For someone like me - overthinking things, always trying to solve problems that aren't mine to solve, wondering why, being self-conscious - this book is marvellous. A study of the ways America changed in the mid-1960s, but with none of the big historic moments, none of the sense of self-importance you get from most books on the topic. Instead, this book is stuck inside the mind of a slightly angsty, slightly anachronistic and rather prim 19-year-old who travels between faux-historic New England, Paris and Rome, thinking about stuff.

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

(FROM MY BLOG) Peter Levi is a tall, awkward, strongly introverted, nineteen-year-old.  He is the son of divorced parents: a college professor and a concert pianist. 

Peter lives within his own head, while yet trying to understand the world in which he lives in 1964 -- his story told against a background of the civil rights movement, increasing homogenization of American daily life, a "junior year abroad" in France and Italy, and the gradually intensifying war in Vietnam. 

Throughout, he endeavors to live his life according to Kant's "categorical imperative" -- "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law." 

Peter can be obstinate, frustratingly single-minded, painfully self-conscious, strangely innocent, and often irritating.  He is also eminently loveable, a boy you'd be pleased to have as a son or nephew.

He is the creation of Mary McCarthy in her 1965 novel, Birds of America -- a book I read soon after it was first published, and just finished re-reading today.  My acquaintance with Ms. McCarthy goes back to undergraduate days, when her essays on Florence, published over time in the New Yorker, were assigned reading in a class on Renaissance history.1  I later read her memoirs of her childhood in Seattle.2  But by 1971, McCarthy was best known as the author of The Group, a scandalous (at the time) best-seller that followed eight young women after graduation from Vassar.      

From a scholarly painting of Renaissance life to a controversial sex novel -- Mary McCarthy's interests and talents were diverse.  In Birds of America, she contemplates -- through her hero's bewildered adolescent eyes -- the tension between democracy and elitism, between mass culture and the life of the individual, between the conflicting demands of humanity and nature.

The book has no plot, as such.  In the early chapters, Peter and his mother move back to Rocky Port, a coastal village in Massachusetts, as a sort of closing chapter of their unusually close, almost Oedipal relationship. Peter eagerly awaits his return to Rocky Port, and has flashbacks to his earlier stay in the village, back in "the old days" (when he was 15!), a time when life was recalled as wonderful -- especially the birdlife and other natural aspects of the coast. 

Now, however, four years later, everything seems degraded.  A beloved owl has disappeared, as have some favorite cormorants.  A highway has been cut through.  His mother, a prototype of today's amateur cooks, finds everyone eating canned and frozen food.

Except in the field of civil rights, he was opposed to progress in any direction, including backwards, ... and wanted everything in the sensuous world to be the same as it had been when he was younger.

The later chapters examine Peter's experiences while a student in Paris at the Sorbonne.  Anyone who visited France in the 1960s will recognize Peter's problems with the peculiarities of French bourgeois culture, food, and customs.

He sat hunched in his corner -- Peter Levi, noted misanthrope.

Peter, at least, is able to speak fluent French. 

Like many of us back then, he finds the French almost impossible to meet, and falls back on American expatriate life -- and finds his fellow Americans appalling.  (His Thanksgiving, as the guest of a NATO-based American general, is wickedly funny -- especially the host's belligerent insistence that one of his wife's guests -- a vegetarian student -- dig into a plate heaped high with a real American turkey dinner, with all the fixin's. And her passive-aggressive efforts to withstand his bullying.)

I recall once telling a fellow undergraduate that I was fascinated by Europe during the Middle Ages, when only the rare adventurer ventured much beyond his own village -- when no one knew quite what you'd find only a few miles down a winding road.  He was appalled at my "romanticism."  But Peter would have understood.

So arriving in a strange town by yourself with just your guidebook for a compass is the nearest equivalent we can find to being alone with Nature, the way travelers used to be in the Age of Discovery.

"Nature" is thus conflated with aloneness, with discovery, with thinking and feeling, and is contrasted with mobs of people, with mass civilization.  Peter later attempts to explain to an unsympathetic academic adviser he unfortuately ran into in the Sistine Chapel that art can only be understood and loved in solitude -- not while being led about by a group guide.  He suggests limiting admission to overcrowded museums by a combination of competitive art examinations and lottery.  His adviser denounces his opinions as undemocratic and elitist.

When I say that the novel has no real plot, I'm also suggesting that Peter's interior thoughts, a lengthy letter to his mother, his discussions with peers and adults, all present at some length what I assume to be Mary McCarthy's own thoughts on a number of subjects.  This in no way indicates that the book presents an ideological diatribe, however.  Mary McCarthy is not a liberal Ayn Rand.  Peter's personality would not permit him to be made use of in that manner.  Although he is stubborn and persistent, he is also subject to continual self-doubt.  He not only encounters well-presented arguments against his positions from others, his own mind is in constant ferment as it develops and presents its own counter-arguments to Peter's own deepest and most cherished beliefs.

Birds of America is a novel of ideas discussed less with an intent to persuade than with a love of playing with them for the sake of playing.  It is also a humorous study of a boy who's an unusual young "bird" himself and -- for us today -- it's a nostalgic reminder of what life was like in the simpler and more innocent mid-twentieth century.

Peter Levi -- boy philosopher -- receives his most profound and devastating insight not from his teachers, his friends, or his own conscious reasoning.  At the novel's conclusion, while delirious from an infection, Peter receives a visitor.   His hero, Immanuel Kant, appears at his bedside, bearing an unsettling message for Peter:  "Listen carefully and remember.  ...  Perhaps you have guessed it.  Nature is dead, mein kind."

-----------------------------

1Collected in book form and published as The Stones of Florence (1956)

2Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957)

[Sady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hannah Arendt wrote some kind of break-up letter to Heidegger while staying at her friend Mary McCarthy's house in Maine. Makes me miss that metal cone my mom would squish apples through to make sauce.

[Pat · Rating 3 out of 5]

(I bought this American classic in the natural history section at a senior center. Sigh ...)
I was disappointed in what I have always heard is one of THe novels of the 1960s.
First off, I'd have trimmed at LEAST 25 pages of the endless repetitive philosophizing between characters, like Mr. Small and Peter's discussion of tourists. I just didn't buy McCarthy's trying to portray a 19-year-old boy's thoughts; when he said he had a vague interest in Roberta's breasts, I thought, "Oh, fer chrissakes--he's 19!" Peter's musings and writings are WAY too sophisticated for a kid his age; see the interminable "letter" to Rosamund. He comes off more like his professor babbo and stepdad than a young student.
I am familiar with the post-War type of Berkeley half-Jewish/refugee intelligensia family from which spoiled little Peter springs; that was well portrayed. His being torn between distaste for the masses (the drunken-woman episode) and his civil rights interests rang true, as did Peter's love/dislaike relationship with the musican mom trying to maintain traditions in a rapdily changing world.

[Nancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although parts were humorous and well-written, the story dragged on far too long and obsessively. I enjoyed the descriptions of Paris and Rome, but could have done without the extensive diatribe on communal toilets or the disquisition on tourism.

[Annabelle · Rating 1 out of 5]

Right after reading Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, I swooped on this one, on the strength of two assumptions:

1 I thought it was a book of short stories about birds; and
2 It was written by Mary McCarthy, the actor Kevin McCarthy's sister, and I was curious to see if it was as good as the one short story I read of hers not too long ago.

Verdict: It is not a book of short stories, much less a book about birds. Instead we have teenaged protagonist Peter Levi, an impressively (albeit at times unbelievably) precocious, philosophical, and mildly neurotic, young Woody Allen-type New Yorker and sometime summer resident of Rocky Port, Maine, the only child of divorced, intellectual parents--a classical harpist (or was it the harpsichord) of some renown and an Jewish Italian emigre professor at some Ivy Leagueish college. The story centers on nineteen-year-old Peter, who once "was deeply in love with his mother," as he coasts through the nineteen sixties of America while alternately living in New York City, Rocky Port, Maine, and Paris, France. A fledgling armchair activist, Peter migrates to Paris to pursue some courses at the Sorbonne precisely so he can dodge the Vietnam draft; he is a pacifist, or at least believes himself to be. He is also a naive bleeding heart who cannot quite ditch the typical sensitivities of his class, the bourgeoisie of the first world. Peter is your stereotypical child of privilege, a bore with very strong opinions, most of which he keeps mostly to himself (but alas, not from us), and some he reserves for his indulgent mother, captive to a son with a talent for writing kilometric, grandstanding letters. Young Peter would have felt right at home in today's world, championing broad spectrum cancel culture from the confines of his latest stepfather’s pied-à-terre on the Upper West Side.

[Leif · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why did I sleep so long on Mary McCarthy's books?

It is humbling to read this expatriate-American bildungsroman cast through the lens of a largely satiric but still earnest exploration of Kantian ethics and a precocious, privileged, and foolish young man. For all that changes, much remains the same. In the early 1960s, the novel's characters contemplate and live through many events that speak to life today: America during the time of the civil rights movement is on fire, but it is also deeply confident; America making the choice between Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson was deciding between what many saw as fascism and liberalism; Americans abroad were forced to be conscious of the reflection of their self-proclaimed exceptionalism - and of their actions, including the bombing of Vietnam. And then there is the idea of what has happened to the power and health of the natural environment, that old enabling story that Americans such as Teddy Roosevelt found so powerful to the national identity that they enshrined conservationism in its core.

Perhaps what is different is the level of discourse: McCarthy's faith in the intelligence of her reader makes for a subtle, thrilling read but not one that moves with the speed of a contemporary, early twenty-first-century novel. Instead, McCarthy's characters are firmly contextualized in locales that speak to cultural differences and lineages: New England's faux-heritage, Parisian existential malaise (for American expats), and Italy's deep but generous somnolescence. There are bitingly funny passages and the joke is often and almost always on the deeply naive protagonist, Peter, but there is also a deep solemnity and compassion for humanity, intelligence, and suffering. Behind it all is a thesis perhaps more buried than exhumed, namely, that the shape of modernity is carved from the dead and hardly conserved bones of what was once called "nature".

Granted, Birds of America is a long and sometimes contemplative novel, but is it worth the time? Yes, yes and yes.

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Never would I ever have guessed that I would love so much this novel from 1965. I should not have been that surprised. Mary McCarthy is one of my favorite female 20th century writers, so intelligent, such sharp humor.

Peter Levi is the son of a Jewish historian, the stepson of a Jewish scientist, the son of a thrice married Anglo Saxon Protestant mother who is also a world famous harpsichordist. He passed his younger years being shuttled between New England and Berkeley, CA. He was in love with his mother as a child. By the end of the book, when he is just 19, he still loves her deeply but is aware of her flaws.

I suspect that a great deal of why I was so taken is the time period. Peter grew up in the same years I did. My parents never divorced but my father was an armchair intellectual, my mother had been an aspiring organist. They were both liberals to the end and encouraged me to be well read, well educated, and intelligent.

Peter is a bit awkward socially. He studies philosophy in college. For most of the novel he is in his junior year at the Sorbonne in Paris. He loves the natural world, is in favor of the Civil Rights movement and agonizes continually about how to be. Most of all, he is against war, the Vietnam War in particular, and has the draft hanging over him, as did all the young men I knew at that age.

How do you write a coming of age tale that is emotional, political, philosophical, and traces so delicately the mother/son relationship, all at the same time? How do you create a woke young man in the latter half of the 20th century? How do you breathe life into such a worldly yet confused character? Read The Birds of America and learn.

[Jody · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book I've been meaning to read for years. Mary McCarthy is a legend. I'd forgotten how readable her books are. Peter is a very intellectual 19 year old, but not unbelievable; I've known some of those. I liked hearing his opinion of his mother's and her husbands' political views. They are intellectuals and slightly patrician although they go to great measures to deny it. When Peter studies abroad (Paris) he decides to live apart from the other American students in order to have a more authentic experience, so we get a more authentic view of the foreigner in Paris in the early 60's.
Now I have to read again The Group and The Stones of Florence. Oh and why not - all her other books!

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an "intellectual" coming of age novel that's somehow rarely precocious (a rarity in itself), but Mary McCarthy, without ever being a bad writer, can be an incredibly tedious one: too many French phrases per sentence, too many references to Kant (and not at all insightful remarks on him). The effect is atmospheric, and if you don't mind this kind of over-indulgent urbanity, it can be charming, especially with McCarthy's backdrop in Maine. But if you're reading for reasons other than being put to sleep, it doesn't give you much of an incentive to slug through it to the end.

[Alexis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hate the people this kid hates but I hate him too.

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. I don't know how it wound up on my booksheves - no idea where I got it from. But it's a great find.
I liked the protagonist, a nineteen-year-old American who goes to spend a year in Paris as part of his university education. I think what I really liked was his attempt to become an independent adult by means of introspection and experimentation. It's difficult to explain how this makes an interesting novel, but it really, really does.

[Lindsey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Only OK as it was pretty short on plot. Kind of amusing to read while being a tourist in France, though.

[Suzanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved McCarthy 's sharp wit. And she was so prescient!

[Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was difficult to rate. It was my first by Mary McCarthy. The writing was quite good. Mary McCarthy is clearly very intelligent and has much to say about the world in which she lives. Birds of America was a tremendous commentary on the culture, the zeitgeist, of the 60’s in not only the US but in Europe as well. Peter Levi, the primary character in the novel, is a 19 year-old who has split his years to date between the northeast and California. His family life is representative of what is beginning to happen in the US; his mother is on her third marriage and Peter splits his time between his mother and father. Peter’s is a very middle-class, liberal family; his mother is a performing musician but also a musical scholar; his father is Jewish and a history professor at Wellesley.

The novel covers the full gamut of the 60’s: civil rights, the Vietnam War, the politics of the time (Johnson versus Goldwater), art and Nature. It was interesting (compared to what we often experience today) that this liberal-leaning family actively debated the strengths and weaknesses of Johnson and Goldwater before making their choices. While this novel’s exploration of the 60’s was quite well done in many respects, it felt tiresome at times, like a dry lecture, and Peter’s whiny, spoiled nature ultimately grated, so that I never fell in love with the novel. There were enough positives in the novel and more particularly in the writing though that I want to read something else by Mary McCarthy. I have heard that many readers like The Group by Mary McCarthy; I expect that novel is in my future.

[Edie Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I planned on giving the book a four, but by the time it finished I realized; I really liked it.

There were rough passages. In the middle of the book I was ready to bail. His constant hesitancy and philosophizing started to get to me. When he wrote his letter from Paris to his mother I was certain that would be the end But I continued and it became interesting again. My favorite parts were in the Sistine chapel as he described how the art looked to him.

A lover of nature, by the end it betrays him.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in the 1970s and had a memory of really loving it. Upon rereading it I liked it but was not as amused by Peter's naivete as I had been. Most of the book takes place in Peter's head even as he is living and passing time in New England and Paris. At this second reading I grew tired of his lengthy mental maneuvers over social situations and over social and political issues. Still, his and the book's connection to the natural world were intriguing in the several guises. Overall the book is an interesting look at that time in the US and the world where people were looking at technology to be a saving grace, where Americans were often trouncing around Europe being rude and inane and at the same time engaging in the Viet Nam war.

[Emily Kestrel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found an old copy of this book in the nature section of the used bookstore in Forsyth, IL, and although I immediately knew it was misshelved, I picked it up anyway because I loved the two other books I've read by Mary McCarthy: The Group and Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. Unfortunately, I never warmed up to Birds of America (although I did, with a bit of effort, manage to finish it). The novel is a very talky, very topical coming of age, at home and abroad, of a painfully earnest young man named Peter Levi. Peter wants to commune with nature and do good works in a Kantian fashion, but real people and his bumbling approach to life keep getting in the way. The characters discuss, at great length, many of the big topics of the day (late 1960s): incipient consumerism, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam war, the boom in the tourist industry, the "death" of Nature, etc. McCarthy is witty, and I imagine that this book packed more of a wallop when it was published; but reading it 40 years later, I just didn't find enough in the way of plot or character development to justify dusting it off today. Don't get me wrong--McCarthy's a great author. But I would recommend starting with one of her other works if you're not already a fan.

[Harsha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although only a less than 300 pages book, I must say this was one book that tested my patience a lot, and I am feeling quite proud of myself at having made it to the last page. It is less a novel and more a record of thoughts of a boy in his late teens on the various changes that took place in the world in the 1960s, ranging from politics to war to relationships to nature. Some part of it takes place in America, while most of the rest is set in Paris and a little of Italy. Though rich in characters, it is a book with very less movement in it, to the point that one would think there is not much story whatsoever. There was a lot of drag, a lot of philosophy which I found quite hard to digest, nevertheless I found Peter's way of looking at the changes around him interesting at certain points, hence the three stars.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

McCarthy tells the story of a young American named Peter Levi, during his anti-climatic journey through Italy and France, and the philosophical travails that he endures. It is easy to dismiss this book as boring; indeed, I took an inordinate time to read it. It is less acerbic than any of McCarthy's other books, but it is intelligently written. Knowing a lot about her, as I do, I see how this reflects her personal politics and temperament, but it is definitely one of her least successful efforts.

[Carl Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

A story with lots of characterization and not much action. Peter, the protagonist, and I share a trait of having long interior dialogs that often stay internal. He's my older cousins' age, struggling to figure out a world of draft deferments, and civil rights, and opposing paradigms that begin to class in the early '60s. Much of the discussion feels dated, but interesting in a passive kind of way.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Where The Group is both timeless and an illuminating look into another era, this felt dated. And yet I still got into it... The protagonist/point-of-view character is super strange, a very introspective teenager fixated on the past, nature, philosophical conundrums. A character I found both incredibly annoying (he never fantasizes about any kind of physical contact with a love interest? is that believable from even the weirdest, most bookish 19-year-old boy?) and incredibly relatable.

[Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting fictional introduction to Kant's moral imperative. I read this in high school and it really packed a punch. It's a terrific "coming of age" novel.

It's a pity that McCarthy seems to have fallen by the wayside as she's a terrific novelist.

[Lisa Houlihan]

I bought this used at a bookstall because I knew Birds of America was a title I meant to read. I've since read Lorrie Moore's title, and because this one is Mary McCarthy I figure I should try it before passing it along.

[David McKay · Rating 3 out of 5]

my friend nat's band shares the name of this book, and when i saw it sitting around my parent's house i had to read it. it was good, but the main character was a little annoying i thought.

[Rachelle · Rating 1 out of 5]

I could have shot the characters in this book. I hated them so.

[Vicki · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had not read this book. I read The Group when I was a Freshman in College and I loved it. I think I would have enjoyed Peter more when I was 19. Now he just seems whiney.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

will never read this author again