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beritt 's review for:
The Spectator Bird
by Wallace Stegner
There is not a single author I love more than Wallace Stegner.
I love Marilynne Robinson deeply, I love Roger Martin du Gard, Simon Vestdijk, and Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz. God knows I love Charlotte Brontë, and Emily, too.
But I love no one more than Wallace Stegner.
There’s something about his writing that makes me feel as if I’m touching the truth of the universe. It’s not what he is writing, per se, but what he is able to convey. You know how there are moments in life where you just feel very strongly “yes, this is what it’s all about”? That’s what I feel when reading his work.
I felt it most strongly with Crossing to Safety and All the Little Live Things, but also with his other works, and certainly with this one. He is just so skilled at sketching real, nuanced human interactions, and real human lives.
The relationship between Ruth and Joe strikes me as so authentic, so true to what it must be like to have been married forty years or more. Their familiarity, their small annoyances, their “attunedness” to each other. Their warmth.
In general, this book feels like a resting place. I felt that with All the Little Live Things too, although there’s a lot more happening in that one and it’s significantly sadder. But that little house Ruth and Joe have, up in the mountains, and only a telephone to reach people (if a storm doesn’t knock it down) and all the neighbors as familiar to them as family — I love that, and I miss it in that weird way you can miss things you haven’t actually had.
I’ll continue to read everything Wallace Stegner has ever written, and when I finish I’m going to start all over again. Thank you, thank you. You don’t know the gift you’ve given us.
I love Marilynne Robinson deeply, I love Roger Martin du Gard, Simon Vestdijk, and Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz. God knows I love Charlotte Brontë, and Emily, too.
But I love no one more than Wallace Stegner.
There’s something about his writing that makes me feel as if I’m touching the truth of the universe. It’s not what he is writing, per se, but what he is able to convey. You know how there are moments in life where you just feel very strongly “yes, this is what it’s all about”? That’s what I feel when reading his work.
I felt it most strongly with Crossing to Safety and All the Little Live Things, but also with his other works, and certainly with this one. He is just so skilled at sketching real, nuanced human interactions, and real human lives.
The relationship between Ruth and Joe strikes me as so authentic, so true to what it must be like to have been married forty years or more. Their familiarity, their small annoyances, their “attunedness” to each other. Their warmth.
In general, this book feels like a resting place. I felt that with All the Little Live Things too, although there’s a lot more happening in that one and it’s significantly sadder. But that little house Ruth and Joe have, up in the mountains, and only a telephone to reach people (if a storm doesn’t knock it down) and all the neighbors as familiar to them as family — I love that, and I miss it in that weird way you can miss things you haven’t actually had.
I’ll continue to read everything Wallace Stegner has ever written, and when I finish I’m going to start all over again. Thank you, thank you. You don’t know the gift you’ve given us.