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editrix 's review for:
The Spectator Bird
by Wallace Stegner
This took a late turn that I’m not sure it needed to, but everything else was full Stegner splendor. The framing of the parallel stories was wonderful, and it all felt so REAL. I love his sense of humor and the wisdom of his insight and the particular combination of these two talents that makes his writing his. For me the machinations of the plot are almost inconsequential compared to how much I cared about how the thoughts and words were laid down in the furrows between the plotted events. (Maybe, in a way, the thoughts and words *are* the furrows that build up and define the fertile plots between them?)
My hesitation in recommending this far and wide is that the subjects he covers aren’t especially timely or important here in 2021 considering all there is to grapple with. (I’m even a little surprised that it won an NBA in 1977, but that probably tells us more about the makeup of the judging panel that year than about the state of the world beyond them.) I mean, do we need to spend time listening to the lamentations of an aging white man who has retired to his dream property with his lovely, forgiving, tolerant, encouraging wife? Definitely not. And yet you too might find comfort in the timelessness of this p.o.v., which will to some extent always be relevant for anyone who looks forward into (and backward away from) old age with any measure of resentment and regret.
I made marks of agreement, amusement, and/or astonishment on probably every single page, but the one passage I dog-eared feels worth transcribing here, as it’s a bit of a thesis statement (coming three-quarters in):
“I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather’s, that you can’t paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on the wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine the life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you’re the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?”
It’s not perfect, but I loved it.
My hesitation in recommending this far and wide is that the subjects he covers aren’t especially timely or important here in 2021 considering all there is to grapple with. (I’m even a little surprised that it won an NBA in 1977, but that probably tells us more about the makeup of the judging panel that year than about the state of the world beyond them.) I mean, do we need to spend time listening to the lamentations of an aging white man who has retired to his dream property with his lovely, forgiving, tolerant, encouraging wife? Definitely not. And yet you too might find comfort in the timelessness of this p.o.v., which will to some extent always be relevant for anyone who looks forward into (and backward away from) old age with any measure of resentment and regret.
I made marks of agreement, amusement, and/or astonishment on probably every single page, but the one passage I dog-eared feels worth transcribing here, as it’s a bit of a thesis statement (coming three-quarters in):
“I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather’s, that you can’t paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on the wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine the life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you’re the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?”
It’s not perfect, but I loved it.