Edith Wharton counted her friendship with Henry James as the crown jewel of her career, but it just might have been a curse. During her lifetime she was labeled, inaccurately, as a disciple of James, an apprentice who inevitably fell short of the...

William Wharton's houseboat, an ungainly marriage of two vessels, doesn't have a name. Or rather, it has too many. In a previous existence, the top half was the Bateau Lymnee. But since that part doesn't actually touch the water, it can't be the...

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 voic...

Birdy is a novel of obsession, of a monomania as exclusive (though hardly as titanic!) as Ahab's pursuit of the white whale…. While the novel centers upon Birdy's obsession, its scope is broad enough to include a number of episodes that collectively present a more generalized (but still vivid) account of what it would have been like to grow up in such a setting at such a time….

[Birdy] is so accomplished in style, so assured of its grip on the reader, that one can easily doubt whether it really is a first novel. William Wharton is a graceful yet powerful storyteller who makes us believe even when we resist. He forces us to use our imaginations and convinces us of his characters' ability to overcome their infirmities yet revel in their eccentricities. (p. 40) Wharton has infused his story of boyhood escape with the harshest of realities. There is harrowing, graphic violence ...