Books: Flights of Fact and Fancy

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BIRDY by William Wharton; Knopf;310 pages; $8.95

It is shortly after V-J day and at a military hospital in Kentucky a damaged veteran sits in a padded cell. Or rather he squats and occasionally hops, knees together, fingers laced behind his back, arms flapping. Understandably puzzled, the Army psychiatrist in charge summons the patient's boyhood friend from the Philadelphia suburbs and asks him to try to break through this strange behavior. Al Columbato brings his own problems with him. He is recovering from plastic surgery on his jaw, smashed in Germany, and from the knowledge of his own profound cowardice under fire. He is not sure that his old buddy in the cell is in any worse shape than he is. "Come on, Birdy," he says, when the two are alone. "Cut it out!"

Thus begins this daring and unusually complex first novel, part psychological thriller (Can Al reach his friend?), part mystery (What happened to Birdy?). It is also an extended memoir of growing up poor in the 1930s, a detailed portrait of a friendship as firm as it is unlikely and an utterly plausible account of an unbelievable obsession. In classical mythology, Daedalus made wings for a practical reason, so that he and his son could escape the labyrinth. Birdy, it turns out, has built wings too, but craved much more. In his cage, he remembers: "I'm also finding it isn't so much the flying I want, not as a boy flapping heavy wings; I want to be a bird."

One sign of the novel's success is the fact that Birdy's desire never for an instant seems risible or even, after a while, particularly bizarre. Thoughts from the hero ("What I need is a tail") that could easily be howlers pass by with the equilibrium of logic and consistency. Method triumphs over madness. In alternating sections, Al reminisces aloud, as much to pass the time as to get through to his apparently oblivious friend, and then Birdy in turn thinks about his past. These two sets of memories are vectors to the present. The personalities of the two men dovetail: Al is profane, athletic, gregarious; Birdy is decorous, wispy and fixated on a world that is real but more acutely visible to him than others. "One hundred billion birds," he muses, "fifty for every man alive and nobody seems to notice. We live in the slime of an immensity and no one objects. What must our enslavement seem to the birds in the magnitude of their environment?"