The Spectator Bird

The Spectator Bird is a novel by the American writer Wallace Stegner, published in 1976. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1977.

Joe Allston spent his working life as a literary agent, handling other people's talent and not much liking the job, and he is now retired. His parents and his only son are dead, which leaves him with no ancestors and no descendants, and he has settled into the position of a man watching his own life rather than living in it. A postcard from an old friend prompts him to take out the journals he kept during a journey to his mother's birthplace in Denmark, where he went looking for a connection to his family's past. The novel alternates between his present, with his wife Ruth and the ordinary business of an ageing marriage, and the recollections he reads aloud to her, which are by turns grotesque and moving and which reveal that he has been a participant in more than he has admitted for years.

Stegner writes about age, memory and the judgements people make about their own lives, and the book is loosely connected to his earlier novel All the Little Live Things.