Joe Allston is a mostly-retired literary agent, settling slightly cantankerously into old age in rural California with his wife, Ruth, and some neighbours in a similar or more advanced state of decrepitude. Clearly (i.e. as evidenced by living a fairly comfortable retirement in nice west-coast surroundings) Joe has made a reasonably successful go of being a literary agent, but still seems to be afflicted by some vague dissatisfaction with life. Part of this might be the stereotypical literary agent's frustrated wistfulness at not being a writer, part of it is clearly frustration with the gradual crumbling of the body (Joe suffers from some sort of arthritic joint problem which requires regular medication), but there is also some residual Unresolved Shit following the death of his and Ruth's only child, Curtis, some decades previously in a surfing accident at La Jolla.
Some time after Curtis' death Joe and Ruth took a trip to Denmark. But why? Well, it's nice and all, but there was the additional factor of that being where Joe's mother came from before emigrating to America as a teenager and marrying a nice corn-fed American called, presumably, Mr. Allston. Joe and Ruth end up staying with a Danish countess, Astrid, in her town-house.
Yes, but this was years ago, you'll be saying, so why is it interrupting this nice story of old people doing old people stuff? Well, Joe has just received a postcard from Astrid - not with any terribly exciting news, just saying hello after what we are invited to infer is a gap of several years - and it sets off a thought process which results in Joe digging out the journal which he kept at the time and agreeing to read it aloud to Ruth.
So you'll observe how our story has bifurcated here: Joe and Ruth living out their creaky-jointed old age and at the end of each day retiring to bed to read some more journal entries and relive their (relative) youth. It turns out, upon finding Astrid's apartment and agreeing the terms of their stay, that her extended aristocratic family own a substantial number of castles and the like in the general Denmark area and, in particular, that she grew up on the estate that included the humble cottage where Joe's mother lived. I know, what are the chances, right?
Joe and Ruth get to know the countess and observe that while she seems very nice she seems to be treated with extreme coolness by the local community. This, it transpires, is because her now-estranged husband was a Nazi collaborator, a Quisling, during the war. Maybe getting out of town will help, and it just so happens that Astrid can facilitate a visit to her childhood home to meet the remnants of her aristocratic family and at the same time enable Joe to check out his mother's (slightly more modest) childhood home.
So everyone heads off, stopping only for a quick meet-up with Karen Blixen who Astrid happens to be good mates with, rocks up at the old castle and meets some eccentric relatives, in particular Astrid's grandmother who makes an appearance at dinner before being wheeled off upstairs again, and Astrid's brother Eigil who takes a bit of a shine to Joe, drags him off for a gruelling game of tennis and subjects him to a rambling anecdote about his father's scientific theories, all of which sound a bit eugenics-adjacent. On returning to the big house Joe discovers that grandmother has died and that their jolly holiday is going to be cut short while all the requisite mourning and funeralling takes place. And so they return to town while Astrid sticks around to help.
Joe's curiosity has been piqued, though, by his conversation with Eigil, and, hampered slightly by the non-existence of the internet he takes himself off down the local library to leaf through some encyclopaedias. And it's a lurid tale of weirdness, eugenics and incest that he discovers, with Astrid and Eigil's father, eminent scientist though he may have been, ending up shunned by the community and eventually taking his own life after the public revelation that he'd impregnated his own daughter. This raises a number of questions for Joe, most pertinently a) does this mean that Astrid bore her own father's child? and b) what implications does this have for Joe's mother, who lived on the same estate? Is Joe, in some weird turn of events, going to turn out to be Astrid's brother?
Well, no, and no, it turns out - Astrid eventually returns to the house and offers some clarification: her father actually had another child by a local woman (not Joe's mother, however) and then, in pursuit of his own genetic theories, impregnated that child once she was old enough, and, as if that were not enough, passed the baton to his own son, Eigil, who not only fathered children by the same woman but fathered another child by one of those children in some insane backcrossing experiment.
The diaries peter out somewhat after this, and so Ruth is left still uncertain about one question that's always bothered her - did Astrid and Joe, once they'd established that they definitely weren't related, have a brief romance of some sort? Well, not to speak of, is the slightly spoiler-y answer, and so Joe and Ruth settle back into their comfortable existence.
I enjoyed The Spectator Bird very much, and there are some observations about the aging process which are uncomfortably pertinent, and Joe is clearly still haunted by the death of his son in a way that he doesn't quite know how to deal with. That subject (i.e. Curtis' watery death) is also dealt with in Stegner's earlier book All The Little Live Things which features a younger Joe and Ruth and to which The Spectator Bird is a sort-of sequel, though just like with The Road Home it doesn't seem to matter much if you skip the first book. All of that stuff is very perceptive in a gentle sort of way, which just provides a slightly uncomfortable contrast with the extreme luridness of all the multi-generational Scandinavian incest-y stuff. That just extends a rich literary tradition that includes former featurees here such as The War Zone, Picture Palace, The God Of Small Things, Not That Sort Of Girl, Invisible, Statues In A Garden, Clea and probably a few others. The addition of a bit of Scandi-Nazism and eugenics into the mix has some strong similarities with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, as well.
The Spectator Bird won the National Book Award for fiction in 1977 (other featurees here are The Wapshot Chronicle, The Moviegoer, So Long, See You Tomorrow, The Shipping News, Cold Mountain, The Corrections and The Underground Railroad); Stegner's earlier novel Angle Of Repose won the Pulitzer in 1972, though not without some controversy.
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