DREAMBIRDS

Nixon links his personal memoirs to the natural and cultural history of the ostrich, only to produce a narrative with as little hope of flight as the dreambird itself. Spanning two continents and two centuries of ostrich-induced get-rich-quick dreams and schemes, Nixon (English/Columbia) muses over the connections between Lithuanian Jewish settlers of South Africa a hundred years ago and ranchers and the rustlers of today’s American West. Both groups pinned their hopes of spectacular wealth on the bird: The South Africans raised their herds for feathers to supply sartorial demands, whereas the Americans determined to create a market for ostrich meat. We travel from the vast stretches of the Karoo Desert to the meetings of the American Ostrich Association, where capitalist visionaries plot how best to put a flightless bird on every American’s dinner table. The politics and passions surrounding the bird come to a head in a question of dead earnest: Will Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress lift South Africa’s long-standing prohibition against exporting live ostriches? The ostrich, though, is not merely being stalked for its socio-historical interest; it becomes a metaphor for the dreams and fantasies of all humanity, especially Nixon himself, who rhapsodizes over his long-necked avian friends while mourning his father’s death—and that of Charming, his great-grandfather’s parrot, murdered at the hands of his Granny. And did he mention his hearing problems as a child? Annoyingly quirky, frustratingly episodic, and stylistically choppy, Nixon’s debut wraps a lifeless memoir in a cloying conceit to increasingly ungainly effect. Readers may just want to bury their heads in the sand.