A Flight of Fantasy

...The next morning he awakened to find his canaries gone...

...Birdy reaches the peak of his preoccupation when, in his dreams, he falls in love with and eventually marries a female canary named Perta...

...In fact, though, his well-organized lunacy can be traced to an unnerving preoccupation with birds (pigeons initially, then canaries) that began when he was a child growing up during the Depression outside Philadelphia...

...Along the way, we learn in copious detail ornithological facts that are absolutely relevant and stimulating to boot...

...True, his failure to fly crushed him, bleached his world of the colors he was accustomed to, but he survives and justifies Al's paradoxical description of him: "Real losers never lose...

...It is a measure of Wharton's success that the very outrageousness of Birdy's fantasies is what arouses our sympathy for him...

...I flap my arms as I fall and I just manage to get back into my sleep under the empty sky...

...just the rest of our lives...

...But," thinks Birdie to himself, "it's worth trying...

...where Birdy questioned, Al was easily satisfied...

...Through brilliant coincidence the line between fantasy and reality evaporates: In Birdy's dream Perta becomes pregnant, while not much later, the real-life Perta has babies...

...Any ordinary person would have been killed...

...Enter Al Columbato, Birdy's childhood friend—for the opening 30-odd pages, the only voice we hear...

...Will I ever wake up in my own bed again...

...In Al's hands, the past, far from being lachrymose and aimless nostalgia, is tightly harnessed to the needs of the present...

...Birdy's unconscious indifference to the conventional goals most young men set for themselves further endears him to us...

...Nothing, Al...

...He is now able to listen to and help Al, whose share of their personal history is exhausted...

...Wanting nothing to do with the conventional world, he substitutes an emotional reality founded on the notion that he himself is a bird: He "squats" and "hunches" in his hopital cell...

...He begins to reacquaint his canaries with the heritage of their species outside of cages—to train them to free-fly, to make nests for themselves...

...where Birdy studied the musculature of the canary flight wing, Al could be found in a rumble seat making his own discoveries in the study of female anatomy...

...One hopes that William Wharton, having so happily married technical virtuosity to a storytelling passion, will continue to believe that fiction is still worth trying, too...

...and I am with them...

...while being fed by a conscientious objector, he flaps his "wings" the way a baby pigeon does...

...We soon learn that theirs is an earned intimacy, based as much on their contrasting personalities as their shared youth...

...He gets knocked on his ass by the first wave...

...Is that all...

...Remembering the past down to the most painful detail has purged him of the temptation to live in it permanently...

...I cannot keep up...

...The day before his canaries migrated, he dreamt: "At dawn, all are ready...

...Reviewed by George Hill There is no need to wait for William Wharton to fulfill his "promise"—as critics are wont to put it?with his second novel...

...Moreover, without those fantasies he and Al would merely strike us as stereotypical "opposites": the bullet-biting muscleman flexing his biceps in one corner, and the vacant-eyed eccentric absorbed in a dance none of us know the steps to in the other...

...we go up in a single movement...

...Outgoing, bursting with anecdotes, Al now tries in vain to inveigle Birdy into remembering the past so that he can admit the existence of the present...

...We feel that if he applied himself to the values ordinarily encouraged by society, he would have a steady job, a four bedroom house in the suburbs of some metropolis, two cars in the garage?and no significance...

...Birdy's ability to diagnose the various ailments of his feathered friends, based on his knowlegde of their anatomy, verges on veterinary genius...

...Gradually, we are exposed to full-length recollections that give us chilling glimpses into Birdy's obsession...

...Here he is describing Birdy's reaction to seeing the ocean for the first time, after the two boys had run away to Atlantic City: "Then Birdy takes off, running, flying, jumping into the water...

...Some girls start to watch and laugh...

...I think he's going to drown, but then he stands up soaking wet, laughing madly, and falls backwards into it just as another wave crashes over him...

...He will even admit that strong and stoic as he wants to appear, he did not "know how much [he] needed to tell somebody" about his fear of being afraid...

...Yet despite Birdy's sin-gleminded preparation for the day when he would fly among his canaries, and Al's obsession with the appearance of physical invulnerability, the two boys remained close friends...

...I find myself getting heavier, falling, gliding down to earth...

...Birdy's glacial silence evokes in him a sense of mission, a plausible reason for his many anecdotes—complete with the kind of emotional "snappers" that would have pleased Mark Twain...

...The story has come full circle with their friendship finding a new source: deciding how to meet the daily challenges that await them beyond the hospital walls...

...I wonder what is happening with my life...

...Al is instantly engaging...

...We fly straight South...

...At the outset, Al's often lonely monologue is punctuated only by Birdy's cryptic interior thoughts...

...Where Birdy turned to breeding canaries, however, Al became preoccupied with developing his muscles and reading Strength and Health...

...He still has his clothes on...

...and, bird-like, he looks at nothing straight on, but with one eye at a time...

...And so what happens then...

...It's never that easy...

...But Birdy's story is an affirmation of "process," of doing something for the sake of doing it, no matter how unobtainable the ultimate objective...

...He's dragged out by the undertow...

...in Birdy's dream there are four eggs, three dark and one yellow, and uncannily, when Perta lays her eggs, there are three darks and one yellow...

...It is through such epigrams and fragments of poetry that Wharton begins to make Birdy's passion for birds comprehensible: They are free, unfamiliar with man's "gravity graves," flying above the "shifting tons" of responsibility...

...This first novel is a stunning achievement—all the more so given the improbability of its plot and the skill required to bring it to life...

...That's all...

...Thus the last of Birdy's interior monologues...

...Not really, Al...

...Unbelievable as this series of events may seem, Wharton turns potential disaster into pleasing success by making the "dream-dream" one more opportunity for us to view the many-layered complexity of Birdy's mind...

...and finally, the night before Perta is killed by a tomcat, Birdy dreams this will happen...

...After Perta's death, Birdy knows it is all over...

...And that's the way it ends...

...they are leaving me...

...Nobody gets off that way...

...Most penetrating is his impenetrable silence...

...He rolls around in the water thrashing and throwing himself into the waves...

...Birdy doesn't care...

...In the process it becomes apparent that Al is no Jamesian ficelle, no mere factotum at the service of his friend's eccentricities, and that this is as much his story as Birdy's...

...At book's close, we come to understand that the "real losers," no matter how pyrrhic their victories, have an appealing kind of resilience...

...A young man, nicknamed Birdy (we never learn his real name), has been sent to the psychiatric section of an Army hospital for reasons theoretically related to a World War II experience in Japan...

...Although these seem to be the inarticulate, truncated meanderings of an insane man, they actually are stanzas of pure—if a little too facile—poetry: "Must not listen./ To hear something, must not listen./ To see something, must not look./ To know something, must not think./ To tell something, must not listen...

...He does not pursue athletic notoriety, even though he is by far the speediest sprinter in his high school, and, during an intramural match, proves himself to be the most elusive wrestler...

...While his model birds and the flight wings he designs for himself (with moderate success) suggests the kind of ingenuity and curiosity that is peculiar only to genius, Birdy does not overvalue academic excellence either...

...A veteran of the War in Europe, he has been sent from Fort Dix, where plastic surgery was being performed on a face wound, to reacquaint Birdy with his past...

...The two were originally attracted to each other through a mutual devotion to pigeons...