Review: The Spectator Bird

June 9, 2025June 9, 2025 / rtrube54 / 4 Comments

Cover image of "The Spectator Bird" by Wallace Stegner.

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?

Review: Remembering Laughter

March 17, 2025March 16, 2025 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

Cover image of "Remembering Laughter" by Wallace Stegner

Remembering Laughter. Wallace Stegner, afterword by Mary Stegner. Penguin Books (ISBN: 9780140252408) 1996, (first published 1937).

Summary: An early Wallace Stegner novella. What happens when Margaret Stuart’s sister comes to live with her and her husband.

In 1936, Wallace Stegner was an English instructor at the University of Utah. An announcement of a novelette prize offered by Little, Brown, and Company caught his eye. But what to write? In the afterword, Mary Stegner shares her role in relating the story of two gaunt aunts living on a farm with a young man who was the son of one of them, though which was unclear. From that family vignette, Stegner wrote Remembering Laughter. To their surprise, they learned he was the prizewinner. He won $2500, very handy when one had an eight month pregnant wife at home.

Turning to the story, Margaret and Alec Stuart owned a prospering farm in west Iowa. Margaret was religious and ran her household with a quiet rectitude. Meanwhile, her husband worked hard but also enjoyed a good laugh, made up stories, and a shared drink with his fellows. Margaret disapproved of the latter and endured the rest.

When Elspeth MacLeod, Margaret’s younger sister by seven years emigrates from Scotland to live on the farm (and hopefully marry a promising young man from the area), everything changes. At first, all is well with welcomes from everyone, including the insipid bachelor minister who Margaret wants to match with Elspeth. And Elspeth embraces her new life joyfully, throwing herself into household chores while describing her surroundings in language reminiscent of Willa Cather. It’s also clear she has too much spirit to for the minister.

Then everything changes with the surprise party Margaret meticulously plans for Elspeth. To get her out of the house, she asks Alec to take her for a long walk by the stream. Bad idea, as the interest each had in the other turns into something more. The rest of the novel plays this out. Key to it all are the choices made (or not made) by each character under the control of Margaret who keeps up the appearances (even with a child who doesn’t know who his parents are) at the cost of laughter in the home. The years pass until we come to the scene of two gaunt women preparing for a funeral that opens the novella.

This book was out of print for many years until re-published in 1996. None of my friends who like Stegner knew of it and I only found it by chance. I thought it so adept at exploring fraught relationships, actions, silences, and their consequences. It previews all the great writing to come from the pen of Wallace Stegner.

Review: Recapitulation

March 7, 2023March 6, 2023 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Recapitulation, Wallace Stegner. New York:Vintage, 2015, originally published in 1979.

Summary: When former ambassador Bruce Mason returns to Salt Lake City for the funeral of an aunt, long-forgotten memories of his youth come back to challenge how he has remembered this formative part of his life.

Memory is a funny thing. What we remember and how we remember former events and people are far from static. They are written and re-written, deleted and restored throughout our lives.

Bruce Mason is a successful former ambassador, still on call for delicate negotiations. It is how he is known, and knows himself. His youth in Salt Lake City has faded to the far recesses of his memories and thoughts. That is, until an aunt for whom he is a guardian passes and he must return as the last living relative to bury her.

When he arrives, he is given a package saved by his aunt. In it are a letter sweater, letters and mementos from Nola, his one serious relationship with a girl. He spends much of his short stay remembering her–how they met, were drawn to each other, the times they were intimate, and the choice he made to delay marriage to pursue law school, sending her pretentious but unfeeling letters, led her to break off the relationship and take up with Bailey, his sexually seductive friend.

He also gets a call from Joe, the high school friend who drew him out of the isolation enforced by his bootlegger father. He worked for Joe’s dad, who wanted to bring him into the business. Joe brought him into a social network that drew him out of his shell. He keeps putting off calling him back, visiting the house late at night but never connecting.

Other memories flood back. The tragic life of his brother. His bootlegger father who he could never satisfy and who constrained his youth, both in not interfering with clients and keeping hush-hush his illegal activity. His long-suffering mother, dying of breast-cancer while his father makes another “business trip.”

He walks and drives the streets, so changed from his youth, bringing back other memories. The aunt’s funeral, concluding the book, ends with a thunderstorm, in some ways cleansing away all the memories as Mason prepares to depart. Or does it?

We are left wondering about the connection between the person he was and the pain he had known, and the person he has become. How is the man he is now related to the youth he remembers. We wonder why he doesn’t want to see his best friend, and why he had not been in touch with this friend after he left Salt Lake City.

And reading this makes one wonder how we have edited our own memories of the past. What have we stuffed in a closet? What self have we crafted and cultivated in our adult lives? Some, it seems, spend most of their lives wistfully looking back on the years of their youth as “the best years of our lives” while others try hard to forget them? It seems to me that Stegner’s novel, for the latter group, underscores the truth that “you can’t go home again” and if you do, you better be prepared for what you may find.

Review: Joe Hill

January 14, 2016January 13, 2016 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments

Joe Hill, Wallace Stegner. New York: Penguin Books, 1990 (Originally published under the title The Preacher and the Slave, 1950).

Summary: Wallace Stegner describes this as a “biographical novel” and in it, he fills out the enigmatic life and death of labor organizer and songwriter, Joe Hill, who was executed for murder before a Utah firing squad in November 1915.

Maybe you have heard of Joe Hill from the poem “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” by Alfred Hayes set to music by Earl Robinson, and performed at Woodstock by Joan Baez, and a range of singers from Pete Seeger to Bruce Springsteen. Hill (also known as Joseph Hillstrom) was a Swedish laborer who emigrated to the U.S., traveling across country from New York to the West Coast and serving as an organizer and songwriter for the International Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the “Wobblies” or the “One Big Union.” He ended up in Utah in 1913, was accused and tried for the murder of a store owner and his son in a robbery attempt by two men in Salt Lake City. One of the two men was wounded. The same night Hill sought treatment for a gunshot wound that he claimed he received in a quarrel over a woman. He never revealed the name of the woman, and was found guilty, and despite efforts that went all the way to the Supreme Court and the President, was executed in November 1915 by firing squad. Among his last words were these:

“Don’t waste time mourning. Organize.” (in a telegram to labor leader Bill Haywood)

Wallace Stegner fleshes out the bare outlines of Hill’s story in this “biographical novel” that explores this enigmatic character, who wrote IWW’s songbook, traveled from town to town hopping trains, and escaping scrapes with goons shutting down labor rallies. He picks up the story in San Pedro where Hill is a dock worker. Much of Joe’s character is explored through the eyes of Gus Lund, a Lutheran mission pastor, who Hill often visited late at night, and who is present with Hill on his last night and at his execution. What emerges is a gifted musician and songwriter, a shadowy figure who skirts the edges of the law and of violence, a selfless organizer for the IWW who will accept no money, and one who views the capitalist system with cynicism, perhaps born of being the bastard son of a Swedish capitalist.

Perhaps the most striking scenes are in a farm labor camp where a labor rally turns ugly, resulting in the death of Joe’s fellow-organizer Art Manderich. We see the substandard housing and primitive sanitary facilities that created the conditions for disease and disability among workers and their families.

Nearly half of the novel is devoted to Hill’s last years in Utah, his humiliation in a music store when he tries to get a love song published, his arrest, his unwillingness to produce his alibi and stubborn insistence upon a new trial. And indeed, the eyewitnesses were unsure of their identification and there were other irregularities in the trial. Hill is portrayed as a martyr for labor. We are never quite sure whether Joe is really protecting the woman over whom he was reputedly wounded, his fellow traveler Otto Applequist, who had his own shadowy pastimes, or whether he really committed the murder but thought the apparent injustice of his execution would better serve the labor cause.

My impression was that Joe Hill was driven by a restless, never in life to be satisfied, anger. Was it really against the capitalist system, or did this personify his capitalist father? What we do know is that he died angry, crying out as his executioners prepared to fire:

“Fire — go on and fire!”

Review: A Shooting Star

August 21, 2014 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Sabrina Castro is the wealthy and attractive wife of a Pasadena physician and also the offspring of a transplanted New England family that found wealth but never a sense of purpose. Life begins to unravel for Sabrina after twelve years of childless marriage as a “trophy” wife when she takes a vacation in Mexico and has an affair with a married man.

Torn between her New England family rectitude and her frustrations, she confesses her affair and yet refuses to utterly break it off, until she sees the other husband for who he is, one who won’t sacrifice his family but wants a bit of something “on the side”. Meanwhile the marriage continues to unravel and with this, Sabrina’s life as she goes on an alcoholic binge, ends up sheltering in the home of a Tahoe dog-boarder, and finally comes home to her mother’s house and the conflicts within her own family.

Underneath it all is the emptiness of Sabrina’s life, rich, and idle, barren (until she discovers she is pregnant by the errant husband) and purposeless. She reconnects with her good friend, Barbara and her husband Leonard, who have worked their way up from poverty to respectable middle-class life in a new suburban community nearby. The book title comes from an evening spent with this family watching a meteor shower and seems a kind of metaphor for the question of her life–will she spectacularly flame out and fade?

The story moves between discovery and despair as she grope to re-establish some kind of relationship with her aging mother separated from her husband early in the marriage, her ambitious brother who would turn the family land into a subdivision of tract homes, and her husband with whom she fails to reconcile. The story reaches a climax on the night Barbara gives birth, Sabrina sits her other children, and Leonard comes home to a drunken and distraught Sabrina. I will leave it to the reader to discover whether Sabrina flames out or survives and what this means for those around her.

The story, set in the late 1950s, explores the discontents of those who have achieved the American dream yet found it wanting. At another level, Stegner as a writer of “place”, explores the changing landscape driven by car culture with its attendant freeways, suburban sprawl, growing pollution, and the destruction of natural habitats to make way for tract homes. While this latter element is in the backdrop, it also reveals the illusions and follies of the American dream and its inability to give us either good purposes or good places.

May 2014: The Month in Reviews

June 1, 2014January 11, 2015 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

It was a rich and varied month of reading–everything from a long history of genocide to a reflective book on a one sentence prayer. I read primary source accounts of the beginning of the Atomic age and a collection of essays on the challenging theological question of “holy war” in the Bible. There was a book on 19th century efforts to reconcile faith and science, and the cutting edge 21st century science of genomics and its challenges to faith and ethics. I explored a full length memoir of growing up in southern Saskatchewan, a full-length biography of the “little woman that started this great war [the Civil War]”, and a delightful collection of short stories by a Bengali Indian writer. So, here is the month in reviews, with each of the links taking you to the full review of the book:

1. God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America, by Walter H. Conser, Jr. The title summarizes the book in many ways, exploring how 19th century theologians grappled, even before Darwin, with discoveries that called into question interpretations of the Bible.

2. The Manhatten Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians, ed. by Cynthia C. Kelly. The immediacy of these accounts combined with the skillful editing that fashions these into a seamless narrative makes this a compelling read of the beginning of the nuclear age.

3. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, by Samantha Power. From the story of Rafael Lemkin who gave us the word “genocide” to the tragedy of Rwanda, and our first real steps to intervene in the Balkans, Power tells a story of America’s studied avoidance for the most part, of using its power to prevent genocide, even while piously saving “never again” after the Holocaust.

4. Excellence in Preaching: Studying the Craft of Leading Preachers, by Simon Vibert. I appreciated both the concept and conclusions of this book but felt it was marred by its exclusive use of white, Anglo male models. Is excellence in preaching really limited to this demographic? I think not.

5. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life, by Nancy Koester. Stowe did far more than just write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She was a pioneer among women authors, the daughter and spouse of New School Calvinist pastors who moved away from these theological roots while not moving away from Christ, and contributed far more to the abolition of slavery than simply her novel. An outstanding biography.

6. Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream, by Suzanne Mettler. Mettler argues that in the field of higher education as in the wider society, our education policies and our failure to maintain policies offering affordable access to all, are creating a new educated elite while excluding many from the lower classes of society.

7. Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life, by J. Craig Venter. Venter was the leader of one of two teams (Francis Collins led the other) who sequenced the human genome. In this book, Venter talks about what he and other genetic researchers have been doing since, particularly in developing our capacities to synthesize DNA and the ways they’ve applied this research.

8. Holy War in the Bible, ed. by Heath A. Thomas, Jeremy Evans, and Paul Copan. This book represents the proceedings from a conference on this issue and is organized around essays representing six different approaches to the question of how we deal with war in the Bible. Probably the most thorough-going treatment on this issue I’ve read.

9. The Jesus Prayer, by John Michael Talbot. This little booklet reflects word by word on the Jesus prayer (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner). A book at once theologically rich, devotionally nurturing, and ecumenically written.

10. Wolf Willow, by Wallace Stegner. This is Stegner’s memoir of the settlement of south Saskatchewan in the area of the Cypress Hills and his own boyhood. He punctuates this with a riveting, fictional account of the struggle of cowboys to survive the winter of 1906, that devastated the herds and nearly took their lives.

11. Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri. This Pulitzer Prize winning collection of short stories by Bengali Indian Lahiri explores the intersection of traditional Bengali values with modernity, particularly in negotiating the immigrant experience. A number of the stories are set in Boston, where Lahiri was educated.

David Brooks, in a recent op-ed in The New York Times made this observation about what books can and cannot do in our lives:

I suppose at the end of these bookish columns, I should tell you what I think books can’t do. They can’t carve your convictions about the world. Only life can do that — only relationships, struggle, love, play and work. Books can give you vocabularies and frameworks to help you understand and decide, but life provides exactly the education you need.

That’s what I felt these books do in my life. It’s my hope that one or more might do the same for you!

Review: Wolf Willow

May 29, 2014May 29, 2014 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Wolf Willow by Wallace Stegner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wolf Willow is a personal memoir by Wallace Stegner, whose fiction and non-fiction writings capture a deep sense of the western places he called home during the early part of his life. The book takes its title from a willow particular to the Cypress Hills, the area of southern Saskatchewan where Stegner spent part of his early years. Unlike many memoirists and fiction writers from small, rural towns, Stegner writes not as one who was cynical and embitterered by the experience. Rather, he recognizes the conditions of the place, physical and otherwise, that shaped both the strengths and the limitations of its people.

The first part of the book chronicles the period before the town he lived in, Whitemud, was settled. He gives us deeply evocative descriptions of the topography of the place, the peoples native to the area, and the defining event of drawing the national boundary between the US and Canada along the 49th parallel (called the Medicine line). We learn of the different tribes, the metis, who were half-breed traders, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who pacified the area in a very different way than the American Cavalry and the transition from buffalo to cattle herds.

The middle section of the book does something novel for a memoir. Stegner inserts a fictional account of the terrible winter of 1906, that more or less marked the end of cattle ranching. The account is absolutely riveting, the majority of which is narrated by a greenhorn cowboy who joins up to herd the cattle through the winter. As the terrible cold and blizzards set in we see the gradual transition from trying to save the herd to physical survival of the men.

The final part of the book chronicles the settling of Whitemud after this terrible winter, and the attempts at turning the area into an agricultural Eden. In the end, Stegner’s family fails to do so, as did many others as they slammed up against the hard reality of insufficient rainfall west of the 100th meridian where their land was located.

In the epilogue, we are reminded that the book began with a return visit to Whitemud by Stegner. We see a remarkable portrait of town father Corky Jones, and the strengths and struggles and limits of this rural community. And we see Stegner’s appreciation for how this community shaped him, even though he and his family couldn’t remain.

This book is one more reason I consider Stegner as one of this country’s great writers of “place”, along with Wendell Berry. Most of us just live in places. What both Stegner and Berry do is help us understand places and how they help shape the lives of the people in those places, perhaps challenging us to begin to notice our own places and how they shape us.

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