The Spectator Bird, Wallace Stegner. Vintage (ISBN: 9780525431879) 2017 (first published in 1976).

Summary: A postcard from a Countess leads a retired literary agent and his wife to revisit the time they’d spent with her.

A postcard interrupts the routines of Joe Alston, a retired New York literary agent, living in California, near Stanford. Mostly, he spends his days caring for his home with his wife, Ruth, attending cultural events, and comparing maladies with other seniors his age. The postcard, from Astrid upsets all that. Astrid was an impoverished countess the two of them had stayed with in Denmark back in 1954.

In 1954, their son had recently drowned in the ocean, whether by accident or on purpose was unclear. Joe and he had constantly fought. The loss reminded Joe of other losses. His father, a railroader, died in his infancy. His mother had emigrated from Denmark, and he hoped understanding something of her background would help root his rootless life.

Joe had kept a collection of journals of that trip that he dug out. When Ruth finds him with them, she asks about why he has pulled these out, and asks if he would read them. So, in the evenings, he would read portions. And as the visit unfolded, the countess revealed the peculiar secret of her family and its own attempts to achieve a kind of genealogical purity. It is a story, that as it turns out, is connected with Joe’s mother’s emigration.

The account is broken up with present day events. A celebrity visits amid a storm and power outage, regaling Joe with his adventures and urging Joe to return to life. Then, clearing the aftermath of the storm, Joe feels his age, suffering several maladies, comforted by Ruth’s care. A neighbor delivers a woodchipper Joe has had occasion to borrow. It is a gift, with the unspoken message being that the neighbor, dying of cancer, will not need it.

Several themes come together in this finely crafted story. Firstly, it is a story about aging. It is not only about the physical indignities of age but also the assessing of what one’s life has meant. Secondly, it is about revisiting the unexamined ambiguities of one’s past. The journal revealed Joe’s fascination with the countess, one both he and Ruth had been aware of. Although he had not acted upon it, it was one of the ambiguities of the couple’s life together.

Finally, we come to Joe’s whole approach to life, that of the “spectator bird,” the observer rather than the participant. He was the literary agent, working for the success of his clients. His journal in Denmark is another exercise in observation. Did he feel an observer with his son, unable to prevent his self-destruction? He describes himself as “just killing time until time gets around to killing me.”

I found myself identifying with Joe. We are the same age and at similar stages in life. There are the indignities of a body that doesn’t always do what you want and imposes its own limits. Then, having laid down one’s career, one wonders what it has meant. And there is the complex companionship of a long marriage, both the deep and comforting bond and the awareness of what an imperfect work of art it has been and one’s own part in those imperfections. One is aware of being loved far beyond what one deserves.

As Joe and Ruth read and process the journals and revisit the past, we await to see whether this will help them make sense of their lives. Will they find the sense and meaning that will enable them to navigate their remaining years with some quality of equanimity? Will we?