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The Spectator Bird
Joe Allston is a retired literary agent who is, in his own words, "just killing time until time gets around to killing me." His parents and his only son are long dead, leaving him with neither ancestors nor descendants, tradition nor ties. His job, trafficking the talent of others, had not been his choice. He passes through life as a spectator. A postcard from a friend cau
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Paperback, 214 pages
Published
November 1st 1990
by Penguin
(first published 1976)
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Ever notice how, on rare occasions, certain writers really stand out for their ability to capture the subtle and complex ways of folks? It’s usually a reason to celebrate since these insights are there for us to imbibe. But it may be a source of distress if what’s revealed is a difficult truth. For me, Wallace Stegner is that sort of author, and this book is one I celebra-hate. Actually, hate is too strong a word, even when it’s combined with a good thing. I should say I felt twinges of disappoi
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Sartre wrote: We are our choices.
At a time of the year when many people of varying ages take stock, Stegner’s story of ageing Joe Allston was especially poignant. Whatever your age, we’ve all had those pivotal moments in life when we chose one fork in the road over the other, and go on to either live with regret, or relief. Even those who feel they’ve lived uneventful lives have, at some point, actively made decisions that altered everything forever.
I sometimes get the feeling my whole life ...more
At a time of the year when many people of varying ages take stock, Stegner’s story of ageing Joe Allston was especially poignant. Whatever your age, we’ve all had those pivotal moments in life when we chose one fork in the road over the other, and go on to either live with regret, or relief. Even those who feel they’ve lived uneventful lives have, at some point, actively made decisions that altered everything forever.
I sometimes get the feeling my whole life ...more
Perhaps more than most of Wallace Stegner’s novels, this one might be read differently by readers of different ages. Stegner wrote it when he was himself sixty-seven, and his protagonist, Joe Alston, is sixty-nine. This first person narrator is judged by his wife Ruth to have become irritable and depressed, and she is probably correct. Joe’s interior monologues are delightfully curmudgeonly. He is a retired literary editor, and his thoughts and speech are filled with literary allusions. Joe is w
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Another deeply satisfying book by Wallace Stegner, with themes reminiscent of Crossing to Safety and Angle of Repose: mortality, the labyrinth of marriage, the mind game that is aging and physical disability, the search for self.
I wonder if to be known to one’s self, to make transparent to ourselves the good and bad that is resident in each of us, is the “safe place” Stegner alludes to so often. Perhaps the safe place is not a physical pilgrimage after all: not returning to our origins, not Bre ...more
I wonder if to be known to one’s self, to make transparent to ourselves the good and bad that is resident in each of us, is the “safe place” Stegner alludes to so often. Perhaps the safe place is not a physical pilgrimage after all: not returning to our origins, not Bre ...more
They say that as we approach old age, some look back with satisfaction and contentment about the life path they followed, and some reflect with regret and guilt, and, in hindsight, wish they had followed other paths to supposedly greener pastures. Approaching 70, our narrator is squarely in the latter category. Despite his and his wife's relatively good health, an accomplished career as a literary agent, and a suburban villa an hour from San Francisco, he is filled with guilt for driving away hi
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Opening: On a February morning, when a weather front is moving in off the Pacific but has not quite arrived, and the winds are changeable and gusty and clouds drive over and an occasional flurry of fine rain darkens the terrace bricks, this place conforms to none of the clichés about California with which they advertise the Sunshine Cities for the Sunset Years.
Page 6 - So far as I can see, it is bad enough sitting around watching yourself wear out, without putting your only mortal part premature ...more
Page 6 - So far as I can see, it is bad enough sitting around watching yourself wear out, without putting your only mortal part premature ...more
Just as well I am sharing a computer with others or I would have been copying out quotes all day long instead of getting on with the actual read. Excellent read but not one to embark upon if feeling low esteemed and/or old. The underlying eugenics story didn't ring true at all for me - just didn't buy into that, I'm afraid, and that is where the last star went flying.
I had wanted to read another novel by Wallace Stegner since “Crossing to Safety”. “The Spectator Bird” lived up to expectations and not because it won the US National Book Award for Fiction in 1977. Even though it was written almost forty years ago, the relevance of the issues it dealt with shone through the pages with contemplative resonance.
Set mostly in Denmark, “The Spectator Bird” centered on Joe Allston, a 69-year-old retired literary agent, his wife (Ruth), and their summer friendship wit ...more
Set mostly in Denmark, “The Spectator Bird” centered on Joe Allston, a 69-year-old retired literary agent, his wife (Ruth), and their summer friendship wit ...more
Added 9/7/13.
I listened to this book via audible.com. Such great writing! Very rich with allusions and metaphors. Wallace Stegner is remarkable!
This was a heartrending story. Stegner poignantly describes the agony of being torn between two loves. There is also a detailed back-story with ominous overtones, but the romantic scenes are always pure.
The audio book was read by Edward Herrmann who definitely added to my enjoyment of the story.
One GR reviewer wrote that the main character's "interior mo ...more
I listened to this book via audible.com. Such great writing! Very rich with allusions and metaphors. Wallace Stegner is remarkable!
This was a heartrending story. Stegner poignantly describes the agony of being torn between two loves. There is also a detailed back-story with ominous overtones, but the romantic scenes are always pure.
The audio book was read by Edward Herrmann who definitely added to my enjoyment of the story.
One GR reviewer wrote that the main character's "interior mo ...more
A beautiful novel by a master of the form. As we get older and more settled, we find the past calling for its reckoning, and in this novel Stegner takes his protagonist on a reckoning from present-day (1970's) Northern California to post-war Denmark through the journals he kept stashed away among his relics. Stegner is a writer's writer who paints the most evocative and striking scenes with his finely honed descriptive eye, while also maintaining characters of sharp wit and intelligence who have
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Another beautifully crafted novel by Stegner about marriage, self-discovery, and...eugenics? Stegner artfully intertwines two plot lines, one that follows an aging, retired literary agent who is approaching his death with a healthy mix of fear, anger, and self-deprecating humor. As readers watch him struggle through his daily routines, something out of the ordinary arrives in his mailbox. It's a postcard from an old friend, a Danish noblewoman he and his wife lived with for a few months more tha
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A short, skillful novel and an improvement over The Angle of Repose. At first, it seems the story is about aging gracefully with good humor and safety, in spite of the corrosive feeling that in your life, you were a spectator, a valet, to the banquet of life. But it takes a turn as the husband reads his diary to his wife about a trip they took to Denmark twenty years before.
For a short book it is multi-layered with the themes of settling into retirement, being part of an old married couple and a ...more
For a short book it is multi-layered with the themes of settling into retirement, being part of an old married couple and a ...more
Now that I am in my sixties, I enjoyed this book more this time around. I first read it several decades ago and it didn't resonate nearly so much. Written from the perspective of a 69-year-old retired literary agent, who is aging ungracefully, it touches on many of the unwelcome losses that the accumulated years bring. Joe feels that he has been a spectator to his own life. Then he starts to read his diary aloud to his wife, about a trip they took to Denmark twenty years before. During that peri
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I didn't realize until the end that this is a prequel to All the Little Live Things, a favorite of mine. Joe Allston is agreeably irascible, a foil to his wife Ruth and the unfortunate and intriguing woman of secrets, Astrid. Psychologically and philosophically true.
This book bored the hell out of me. Which is a shame, b/c Stegner is a wonderful writer and a decent storyteller. The protagonist of the story is a retired literary agent living out his life in Northern California (having retired from New York). A postcard from an old friend sends the character looking at old journals and the story takes off from there.
There is no denying Stegner's skill as a writer. He writes clearly and his imagery is evocative. His dialogue is clean and clear. He writes, fro ...more
There is no denying Stegner's skill as a writer. He writes clearly and his imagery is evocative. His dialogue is clean and clear. He writes, fro ...more
I LOVED this book. But, then again, I love Wallace Stegner. I listened to it as an audio presentation and the reader, Edward Herrmann, did a fantastic job as an old man...and then transitioned into Ruth, his wife, and THEN into the Danish characters. It centers around the theme of an 'old' (68!), arthritic man in the 1970's, and his reminiscence of their time in Denmark in earlier years as he reads his old journals to his insistent wife. It is also about an old man as he ages. I feel Stegner has
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I am almost certain I will read this again in 20 years time and give it 5 stars. It is full of the poignant, often sad, old age musings of a retired New York literary agent as he battles with ageing, perceived irrelevance and questions of identity and legacy. With both his parents and his only child dead, what will be the evidence he even existed? Has he only been a spectator in life? Is he just killing time until time kills him? His humour is sarcastic and deliciously dry (while travelling he n
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Sniff, sniff, blubber, blubber...You did it to me again, Wally.
Joe Allston is not living his “golden years” gracefully. Nearly 70, he is consumed with the notion that he’s just “killing time until time kills him.” He’s obsessed with his physical ailments and thinks he’s losing his sharpness and vigor. He views his life as mostly one of failure to impact anyone for positive. His wife Ruth is impatient with his dour affect. She urges him to write as a form of therapy, but he’s reluctant to do so as he just doesn’t have the spirit that’s needed. He lost an adu
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With The Spectator Bird Wallace Stegner returned to Joe Allston, whom we first met in All the Live Little Things. He's a retired literary agent, now living with his wife Ruth in California and still depressed about their son's early death in a surfing accident, which Joe thinks might have been suicide.
The Penguin paperback edition I read has an introduction by Jane Smiley that is really good. It situates Stegner in the context of his literary times, noting his feeling that the Eastern establishm ...more
The Penguin paperback edition I read has an introduction by Jane Smiley that is really good. It situates Stegner in the context of his literary times, noting his feeling that the Eastern establishm ...more
Not a word is out of place in this comparatively short novel by Stegner. And that is eminently suitable for a novel that revolves around the retelling of a 'memoir' (diary-notes *were* taken at the time..) and 'life memories' from one particular earlier life-period of a 'retired literary agent,' the protagonist of the novel. ...So put on your 'literary thinking caps' and stir up your own memories of every 'lit. course' you ever took, way-back-when, because the references and allusions to almost
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A dark and surprising book. For one thing, I wasn't aware that the indignities of old age were a theme in the fiction of the 1970s. The novel alternates between the present, when literary agent Joe and his wife Ruth have retired to California, and the past, when they traveled to Denmark in the aftermath of their only son's death. Twenty years ago, after Curtis died, possibly a suicide, Joe and Ruth decided to spend a few months in Denmark, wherefrom Joe's mother had emigrated as a teenager. By a
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Another delightful book from Wallace Stegner. Even though I have ones I favor more than this one (Angle of Repose, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, All the Little Live Things). Stegner is capturing getting old in a way that I do not believe that anyone else succeeds, with the fear, but also with the intimacy of couples that are married for long long years, with regrets and memories, with friends that are going away (passing away, or losing their health, or just far away). Joe is more funny yet grump
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Expansion of the title: Joe Alston, the main character, was "a wisecracking fellow traveler in the lives of other people, and a tourist in his own." He drifted into his profession, as into so many so-called decisions in his journey.
This book is about the choices we make in our lives -- or the lack of choices. It can be poignant and funny at the same time, true to Stegner's mastery of the English language. I know of no other author who can entice me to start a book and read until I fall asleep, t ...more
This book is about the choices we make in our lives -- or the lack of choices. It can be poignant and funny at the same time, true to Stegner's mastery of the English language. I know of no other author who can entice me to start a book and read until I fall asleep, t ...more
Joe Allston & his wife are getting old, and Joe feels like his life has been pointless. After receiving a postcard from an old "friend," Joe agrees to read his wife his journals of a trip they took to Scandinavia after their son's death/suicide decades earlier. The book is painful, because you suspect the whole time that Joe has had an affair with this "friend," but the actual truth is not something you see coming.
I loved the book because it was Stegner, and he's such a fabulous writer. But ...more
I loved the book because it was Stegner, and he's such a fabulous writer. But ...more
I am giving this Wallace Stegner novel only four stars because it doesn't quite measure up to his masterpieces Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety. Nevertheless, Stegner has rare gifts as an author that manifest themselves even when the subject matter is peculiar, in this case the discovery and exploration of a pathological situation. That episode, which is recounted in a diary, is set in Denmark twenty earlier. The present is California in the 1970s, when the narrator, Joe Allston, is retire
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Wallace Stegner is more praised for his impact on and affiliation with other great authors -- Tom Wolfe, Larry McMurtry, Ken Kesey, Edward Abbey, et al. -- but I consider his own fiction to be rather underrated.
One of the highlights of my sportswriting career had nothing at all to do with sports. I chatted for a few minutes with Wolfe once regarding Stegner's antipathy toward Kesey.
I've read most of Stegner's fiction and quite a bit of his non-fiction. He is a remarkable craftsman. I encourage y ...more
One of the highlights of my sportswriting career had nothing at all to do with sports. I chatted for a few minutes with Wolfe once regarding Stegner's antipathy toward Kesey.
I've read most of Stegner's fiction and quite a bit of his non-fiction. He is a remarkable craftsman. I encourage y ...more
I continue to be impressed with Wallace Stegner. Here's a novel about an aging literary agent, struggling with the meaning of his life now that it's declining and his body is not functioning the way it once was. That's far removed from my current life experience (30-something mom of small children). And yet! I felt I could identify with so much. The writing is impeccable, with ideas bound up in every forward movement of the plot. There are plot surprises (told in the form of remembrances), and t
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I'm starting to think that enjoying books is as much about timing as it is about words. This one caught me at the right time, all unawares.
Strangely enough, I really did not enjoy Angle of Repose, which is much more of a book. This is more of a musing on age, memory, love, and family. It feels a little thin if you try to make it into a BOOK. Not much happens and the narrator is a grouchy guy who's acting older than he really is, BUT. But. There is beautiful language and the intimacy of a many-d ...more
Strangely enough, I really did not enjoy Angle of Repose, which is much more of a book. This is more of a musing on age, memory, love, and family. It feels a little thin if you try to make it into a BOOK. Not much happens and the narrator is a grouchy guy who's acting older than he really is, BUT. But. There is beautiful language and the intimacy of a many-d ...more
What a beautiful writer is Wallace Stegner. I'd really give this 4.5 stars if that were possible, and the only reason it didn't get five is that I didn't find it quite as perfect in comparison to Angle of Repose (6/5) and Crossing to Safety (5/5). This 1976 novel is about 69-year-old Joe Allston, a writers' agent who has retired to the hills above Stanford U (where Stegner lived). He is dreading the ravages of time and feels that somehow he has been but a spectator throughout his life, rather th
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Another wonderful book by Wallace Stegner. I've read four of his now and have loved each one. This is the story of Joe Allston who is in his late 60s, has aches and pains and wonders if this is all there is to life. He receives a post card from an old friend and discovers she has died. Searching through some old boxes, he comes upon journals that he had written about a trip he and his wife had taken to Denmark years earlier, and reads them to his wife. The journals tell the story of his trip and
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| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All About Books: The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner (Gill & Jenny) | 46 | 28 | Dec 28, 2014 12:24AM | |
| Stegner - a brilliant writer | 5 | 20 | Feb 15, 2014 10:40AM |
Wallace Earle Stegner was an American historian, novelist, short story writer, and environmentalist. Some call him "The Dean of Western Writers." He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977.
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“Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to
wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”
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wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”
“The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”
—
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