Tony's Reviews > The Spectator Bird

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.”