Wallace Stegner
Winner of the 1977 National Book Award, The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner tells the story of seventy-year-old Joe Allston, a retired literary agent. Joe lives in California with Ruth, his wife of many years. This is a character-driven novel unfolding in two alternating time lines.
The narrative opens in the present with Joe and Ruth bickering back and forth. Their lives are jolted when they receive a post card from a friend, a Danish countess named Astrid whom they met twenty years ago when they stayed at her home in Denmark. The post card sends Joe retrieving a three-notebook journal he wrote while in Denmark. Ruth’s insistence that he reads her the journal opens the second time line.
Joe’s back story reveals he harbors considerable guilt. His mother arrived from Denmark at the age of sixteen. She married his father and raised her son single-handedly after his father’s death. Joe recognizes he never fully appreciated her while she was alive or understood her sacrifice. He also harbors guilt for his inability to bond with his son who drowned in a surfing accident. Was it an accident or suicide? he wonders.
As Joe reads the journal, we learn he and Ruth had embarked on the trip to Denmark in an attempt to heal after their son’s death. Joe also wanted to return to his mother’s place of birth to learn something about her past. Their encounter with Astrid and her family triggers shocking revelations and threatens to disrupt their marriage.
The novel unfolds in Joe’s first-person narrative. His interior landscape as well as his conversations with Ruth reveal Joe to be intelligent, self-analytical, extremely well read, eloquent, self-deprecating, delightful, incorrigible, cynical, and utterly charming. As a man in his seventies who is painfully self-conscious of his declining physical abilities, he is a cantankerous, elderly curmudgeon, but he is no less charming.
Stegner’s characters are authentic. Two of the most engaging aspects of the novel are Joe’s realistic voice and his true-to-life relationship with Ruth. Their mutual love and reliance are revealed in their conversations, gentle barbs, and awareness of one other’s foibles. Their ability to communicate without speaking and to read one another’s expressions and moods is an ability shared by many couples who have lived together for decades.
Stegner skillfully captures the fabric of aging and the give and take in the lives of two people who have spent a life time together. Joe and Ruth have grieved together, have faced life’s challenges, are witnessing the illnesses and deaths of close friends, and are struggling daily to cope with the indignities of their aging bodies. They connect with love and companionship. And in Joe Allston, Stegner has created an unforgettable character who revisits his life and the choices he has made. It is only after reading his journal he realizes he has not been a totally passive spectator in his own life. He exercised choice when it mattered most even though his choice may be tinged with regret for the path not taken.
An eloquent, literary tour de force with themes that are as relevant today as they were when it was first published over forty years ago.