Every now and then a book comes along that is sharply original and unmistakably itself, while at the same time it fits easily into one's reading experience. Birdy … is such a book. Its distinctly idiosyncratic characters, Al and Birdy, are quickly assimilated into a family of book relatives: Huck and Tom, then Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, then Queequeg and Ishmael, Crane's Henry Flemmming, and Holden Caulfield….

In nineteen alternating but not antiphonal chapters, their two voices tell a double love story and develop a counterpoint which, as in a Bach fugue, enriches each voice and makes the value of the two far greater than their sum….

[When] Al tries to explain legs, tits, and ass to him, Birdy reacts with the single most misanthropic reflection in the book. But Wharton doesn't insist on such psychological "causes" or "explanations." Al simply represents the failure of Latin macho violence as a life strategy: in a book where war is a stupefying void, where jock violence is without honor, and random fucking is a form of alienation, he reveals the paralytic horror of being lost and helpless on the no-man's-land of battle; he is funny (sometimes very funny), and, for all his sedulous sowing of wild oats, Al has loved but one human in all his life—Birdy. Indeed, Al's and Birdy's mutual affection is all they have left to rescue them from what Al insists is a ratshit world….

The ardent sincerity and elemental feelings of [Birdy's dream of life as a bird] are illuminated by a bright, clear-burning eros that makes the cetological ballast of Moby Dick seem clumsy and irrelevant. Birdy's choice of a bird is made on aesthetic/erotic grounds from the start…. The minute he gets her home and into the cage he has built for her, he gets out his binoculars, squats on the chair across the room, and begins to observe her—erotic and scientific interest perfectly blended to an innocent intensity. The account of Birdie's taking her bath is quite breathless—Birdy's as much a voyeur as Jimmy Stewart in "Rear Window" and when, in the dream rhapsody, Birdie's dream surrogate, named Perta, emerges from the bath, she is as irresistably eroticized as Praxiteles' Aphrodite. Dreaming the dream in bed, Birdy the boy loads his sheets night after night with his adolescent emissions—which his dreams fashion into ecstatic matings between Birdy-as-bird and his bird-love Perta, and into generations of their offspring. Yet no detail of the dream rhapsody—almost a quarter of the book—bears the slightest tinge of prurience.

While Birdy is the constant subject of Al's chapters, Al can play a lead role in Birdy's narrative only as the large, mean, dark, macho canary which Birdy names Alfonso and chooses to fertilize his own beloved Birdie. The effect is not the least bit kinky, and the narrative does not move toward homosexuality. In the dream Birdy is becoming more like Birdie (not even in a dream does he identify with Al) because, he says, he knows Birdie best. Still he's confused; "I begin to wonder if I'm a female. Birdie's a female, but I was in the male cage. I'd like to find out which I am. I don't want to make myself into one or the other. I just want to know." The subtext here is only partly the adolescent search for sexual identity. The Male Cage, the Breeding Cage, and similar images reverberate throughout the books, though neither author nor characters explicitly parallel these concepts to human sexuality.

Still, unexplicated parallels and displacements of this sort are central to the later sections of the book where Birdy's daytime activity more and more has meaning only insofar as it becomes the material that feeds his nighttime dreaming. (p. 17)

Years before Birdy had been observing birds closely, even doing flying exercises, trying to learn their secrets, especially how to achieve his greatest desire: to fly … without motors or wings. But to his surprise, learning to sing, to imitate and even to surpass Alfonso's passionate riffs, is an even greater turn-on than learning how to fly. And in a seductive and devastating moment—the finale of his narrative—he suddenly takes a great leap backward from reality and gives in to fantasy; "If I can fly in my dreams, I don't have to fly in the real world."

Episodes like these—indeed Birdy as a whole—suggest the closeness of dream, fantasy and fiction. The storyteller, impelled to claim that his lies, no matter how mad or metaphorical, are true, endeavors by a variety of means we sanction as literary techniques, to reify his imaginings as art. Birdy's madness—at this stage, the Dream—is rendered as fiction of the purest verisimilitude made incandescent by the fissionable eros of his obsession. At the same time, Birdy the narrator is the quintessence of reasonableness, precise and capable to a degree that few of us ever are—his madness has the cleanly order and energy of good fiction.

An archetypal cat, inevitable as nature, brings death into the Dream and thus into Birdy's consciousness. Alfonso and Birdie don't seem to notice when random death strikes their nest, but Birdie the boy in a similar situation feels a terrible sadness, the great loss and loneliness that birds can deal with but boys can't. Soon after, nothing is left of the dream, all that's left of adolescence is to be drafted, and the Birdy narrative—its last 25 pages are as moving as anything I've read in modern fiction—is over.

The rest is Al. Or should be. His narrative of cowardice and collapse under fire recreates (better than any of the many war movies I've seen) the confusion, disorientation, and anti-heroic helplessness of a G.I. lost during the chaos of attack and counter-attack. Unfortunately this fine chapter is followed by another, a plague of slapstick and balderdash in which Birdy becomes a canting pontificator.

As adolescent dream, Birdy's escape into birdhood—flying with its illusion of freedom, the vision of perfectly realized erotic love, connubial bliss and familiar fulfillment—is satisfying, especially since Wharton does not overstress the misanthropic possibility of such an escape as Swift does with the Houyhnhms. But the Dream is plainly not intended as a Utopian metaphor, though it has been praised as such. Birdy himself dismantles the Dream because he cannot reconcile the complexity and longevity of human emotion with the bird world's cyclical brevity and simplicity—which all begins to seem mechanical to him. And even the mildest feminist point of view shows the inadequacy of the aviary to provide "positive role-models."… Whereas Perta and Birdie are very sharp, even heartbreakingly lovely, birds, there is no human female of any consequence in this book. (pp. 17-18)

I doubt that this book, which made me laugh often, cry some—and makes me think of it now with pleasure—will have many female readers who will think of it as well as I do. Yet to my surprise, many girls of my generation seemed to be able to like Catcher in the Rye. Birdy seems to me to be a better book in most ways; perhaps it will have its share of female admirers too. (p. 18)