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 contains many passages of almost incandescent beauty, passages where exact observation, combined with an exalted state of feeling, finds expression on what might be called a visionary level. But I must admit that eventually I began to read them with more admiration than pleasure. The central fantasy impresses me as being excessively detailed and repetitious, "overdetermined" in the Freudian sense. The canary-lore finally becomes too burdensome—it's as though the famous chapter of cetology in Moby-Dick had been expanded...