Birds of America by Mary McCarthy

He decided they were sacred birds, an unholy trinity. Standing on their dark piles in the water, they had an evil, old, Egyptian look; gorged, their black wings spread to dry in the sun, they resembled hieroglyphs or emblems on an escutcheon. In their neck was a pouch that bulged when they had been fishing. They did not swim or float on the surface like other birds but darted through the water in a sinuous, snake-like way. He had never seen them squat or sit. They were always erect, spread-eagled; not sedentary--vigilant. They seldom moved, though they occasionally gave a flap of their wings or a turn of their long serpentine necks. They usually stood facing away, surveying the cove like sentries, or, in profile, commanding the open sea, but sometimes he would come back from some private sleeveless errand to find that they had wheeled about and were facing him in glistening formation. Unlike the shrieking terns and squawking gulls, they did not utter a sound. This stillness and fixity were what made them seem so horribly ancient, Peter thought, as though they preceded time. That and their snaky appearance, which took you back to the age of flying reptiles. Moreover, their soundless habit gave their slightest movement a quality of pantomime; from his bedroom window, he could pretend he was watching a drama of hieratic gesture.

Peter Levi is nineteen years old, the son of a famous American pianist and a Jewish-Italian emigre. He's extremely attached to his mother (the pianist), and his only dream is to return to the small New England town (in what seems to be Rhode Island) where they once spent a pleasant summer with her and to live in a little college. But when she's offered a grand European tour, Peter must be sent to boarding school, and form there to a European tour of his own, living in Paris, visiting Rome, getting the kind of "education" that is given to American WASPs. In Europe, Peter finds it a challenge to fit in, either among the French or his fellow Americans. He's deeply empathetic and principled--his maxim is Kant's golden rule, that people must be treated as a means and not an end--but living out this principle is harder than it seems.

Birds of America is a deeply philosophical novel, and becomes moreso as it goes on. A long letter from Peter to his mother is a working-out of his principles, and one of the final chapters takes the form of a long conversation at the Sistine Chapel with his advisor at the Sorbonne, who challenges Peter on the contradiction between his Kantian ethic and his anti-democratic attitudes (that is, he hates the hundreds of uncouth American tourists who converge on the sites of great European art). At the novel's end, Peter is in the hospital--having gotten an infected bite from a menacing swan, which is very funny--and has a vision of Kant himself, who tells him that "Nature," like Nietzsche's God, "is dead." What this seems to mean is that, in an increasingly fraudulent and modernizing world, not only tradition, but also nature, cease to be effective moral guides. As such the end of the novel returns to the beginning, where a sheepish Peter learns that a beloved owl, kept in the Rocky Port wildlife refuge, has kicked the birdy bucket.

Probably a more interested person could tease out the exact philosophical contours of the novel. I'm more drawn to a reading that emphasizes Peter's character, which is that of someone with a detailed set of principles he finds it impossible to apply. He's just too pusillanimous, and most of the novel's drama is him imagining what he might do to put the Golden Rule into practice, and never quite getting the opportunity. (It's impossible to imagine Peter traveling to Mississippi with the Freedom Riders, as his parents forbid him from doing at the beginning of the novel.) When he does try to turn his ethic into practice, the results are comical slapstick, picking pathetic fights with the French police or letting a homeless woman sleep in his bedsit. (She pees everywhere and steals his doorknob.) I

I detect a conservative streak in Birds of America, though its politics are ostensible anti-Goldwater liberalism: a belief that the world is getting worse, or at the very least, in worse taste. This is most evident, maybe, in the Rocky Port sections (the best part of the book) where Peter and his mother become increasingly unable to find the traditional goods they associate with the New England coast. We live in a world, McCarthy suggests, where even on the Rhode Island coast, you can only find frozen fish. Maybe so. It's all very Updike, I think. It's also a book about how the son of a Jewish emigrant becomes, in practical terms, an American WASP--another heritage gone, a moral code without purchase. But true to the novel's title, there are a lot of good descriptions of American birds (like the cormorants described above), and what more can you ask for?