The Spectator Bird

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner turns his attention to the life -questioning dilemma of old age in this complex, fascinating novel. A richly evocative book, it is both the odyssey of a man in search of foundations in his unsecured life and an imaginative tale worthy of Isak Dinesen.

Joe Allston is a seventy-year-old literary agent who has settled in California. In his own words, "I ant just killing time till time gets around to killing me." His parents died early, his only son died twenty years ago. He fell into his job by chance and trafficked in the talent of others. Without ancestors or descendants, tradition or place in the world, he has passed through life as a spectator, "a wisecracking fellow traveler in the lives of other people, and a tourist in his own."

A postcard from a Danish friend of twenty years before causes him to return to his journals of the trip he took to Denmark seeking roots in his mother's birthplace. Together with his wife, he relives that trip nod the experiences, both grotesque and moving, in which he "wasn't quite spectator enough." The memories of a Danish castle and a beautiful countess form a counterpoint to the search for meaning in a modern would-be Eden filled with decline and death. Yet, even in the midst of despair, there is hope and comfort in the sharing of the journey, in the companionship of a fellow voyager through the tangled welter of life.

Eerie and brilliant, THE SPECTATOR BIRD shuffles among many layers of time and meaning. It is an absorbing tour through the landscape of a man's life.