Content Warning: This section contains references to incest and eugenics.

A 69-year-old retiree and self-confessed “curmudgeon,” Joe Allston is the protagonist and narrator of The Spectator Bird, which follows two episodes in his life: a week in 1974 and, by way of journal entries, three significant months in 1954. Once an aspiring writer, Joe was sidelined during the Great Depression into a stable but humdrum career as a literary agent. As a result, he has always felt like a spectator or “tourist” in his own life. For 40 years, he guided other writers to success and now, eight years into retirement, mourns the lack of a personal legacy. The son of a Danish immigrant and an itinerant railroad worker, both of whom died when he was young, Joe feels cut off from both past and future: His only offspring, a “beach bum” who rejected his father’s values to pursue a drifting, hedonistic life, drowned as a young man, possibly in a suicide. The interconnected themes of Choice and the Inevitability of Regret and American Deracination Versus European Gothic thus dominate his character arc.

Throughout his first-person narration, including his journal entries, Joe quotes other writers copiously as a substitute for the literary “monument” he never created for himself.