Volume 16, Number 10 · June 3, 1971
Ironical Aviary
By V.S. Pritchett
Birds of America
by Mary McCarthy
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 352 pp., $6.95
The title of Mary McCarthy's new book makes clear that this is an ironical ornithology of certain American species on their contemporary feeding grounds in New England, Paris, and Rome. It is really an education of a young American bird watcher, Peter Levi. He is literally that. From boyhood his lonely, seeking mind is haunted by the lusts of the Great Horned Owl, the ancient knowledge of the cormorant. His talented twice-divorced mother, who is 'perfect' in her divorce—no alimony—and who is 'too good to be true,' is, for him, a rose-breasted grosbeak; the hard-drinking local Admiral with his horrible curries and his telescope has 'the hoarse voice of a sea bird.' Not for nothing is the cormorant dying out. Not for nothing at the end of the book has young Peter Levi, lying in a fever at a Paris hospital, been injured by an angry swan in the Jardin des Plantes. Not for nothing in his delirium does he see his favorite philosopher, Kant, crawling up the coverlet with the news that God is dead—everyone knows that—but that Nature is dead too.
Review, 2413 words
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