Books: A Tale of Two Cultures

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BIRDS OF AMERICA by Mary McCarthy. 344 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $6.95.

It has been seven years since Mary McCarthy published The Group, her witty, intricate chorale of the '30s, which was praised at the cash registers and patronized by the critics as a popular piece of junk. Such a misunderstanding is unlikely to befall her ambitious new book. Birds of America is so deeply plunged in thought that, despite attractive characters and immaculately constructed scenes, it often seems less like a novel than one of the author's admirable essays. The principal thinker, whose mind frames and filters the events, is a 19-year-old American boy named Peter Levi. What he and the author are up to is nothing less than a tenacious examination of certain American ideals and shibboleths—among them human equality and the sacredness of nature.

The reader first meets Peter as he returns after several years' absence to the New England village of Rocky Port to spend the summer with his twice-divorced mother. It is 1964. The village, which seems hard by Stonington, Conn., where Mary McCarthy once lived, is much changed. In vain his mother, who believes in old-fashioned cookery, harangues local grocers for tapioca and fresh fish; she also scours local shops for real jelly glasses. She regards the changes only as part of a dreadful decline in traditional American virtues. What his mother mourns, Peter misses too. But he suspects that her tastes may be more the product of privilege than the frontier spirit. Perhaps the decline of Rocky Port is a corollary of mass-produced equality? One peculiarly American theme of the book lies in the boy's continual worry over the conflict between an educated eye for quality and a blind belief in equality.

In the fall, Peter goes to Paris alone for his junior year. There the author turns him into a familiar figure: the well-meaning American abroad, the fresh, inquiring member of a new generation. The narrative becomes a loose variant of the "road novel," a series of set-piece scenes in which Peter's ideas are tested by experience. In a hilarious initial encounter with retired Kansas schoolteachers on the boat train, Peter learns the depths of his own anti-Americanism. Later a wretched Thanksgiving spent at the home of a U.S. general confronts him with the anguish of American inertia in pursuing un-American aims in Viet Nam. When he retreats to Italy at Christmas to salve his soul among the airy splendors of the Sistine Chapel, his democratic principles are tried again. Everywhere he finds "dark serried groups reminding him of flocks of starlings." "If you love someone," Peter admits, "you want to be alone with them. The same with art. When I'm in the Sistine Chapel, I hate my fellow man."

Maxim from Kant. Peter represents Mary McCarthy's first attempt to write from a male point of view and there are moments, especially those involving sex, when she is not wholly successful. When she is stuck, she tends to rely on a rationalization. For instance, it is one thing to say that Peter is obsessed with fair play, but is it really likely that he would have given up masturbation after his mother left his stepfather, "because she was not even going to parties"?