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...