The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner

One of my favorite books is Wallace Stegner’s Angel of Repose.  One of the most disappointing books I’ve read is Wallace Stegner’s The Spectator Bird.  Stegner is brilliant, no matter what he writes, but The Spectator Bird doesn’t shine with his usual genius.  It becomes murky in places and other times downright tediously boring.  Yet, while perusing my book notes, I find myself liking The Spectator Bird a lot more, a kind of hindsight appreciation.  The story is convoluted and the characters that Stegner uses to tell it are not for the most part that likeable.  Joe Allston is the cranky narrator, but eventually as his story is revealed his cranky is forgiven.  Joe finds himself entangled in a mess of an aristocratic Danish family and their lies, and he feels caught in the net as a spectator.  What Joe is really caught in is the grief of losing his son.  Joe finds some distraction from this loss when he visits his maternal homeland in Denmark and becomes involved in a gothic mystery as it unravels.  What Joe discovers is that as much as he may wish to be merely a spectator, he isn’t.  Joe realizes we cannot so easily disengage and disconnect ourselves from one another:

“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?” (p. 162)

Yet by the end of the story, Joe calls this interconnectedness, especially with his wife Ruth, “everything”:

“The truest vision of life I know is that bird …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.”  (p. 213)

This is Joe at his best.  This is Stegner at his best and makes it worth reading all 214 pages of The Spectator Bird.

I ran across this quote somewhere and picked up on the word “spectator,” and printed it as a bookmark for the book.  I now see it’s the perfect quote for Joe Allston and Wallace Stegner.  Really for all of us:

“Every living creature that comes into the world has something allotted him to perform; therefore, he should not stand an idle spectator of what others are doing.”
Sarah Kirby Trimmer