Birds & bird-omens

Fallen and falling birds recur as omens, and bird-physiognomy marks the novel's predators and mothers. The seed is the dead bird in the Incandenza Jacuzzi, glossed as "like 'a wren, maybe'" (p. 44), which Orin — costumed as a cardinal — later "recalls" when he falls (pp. 65-66), a fall grimly proleptic of his roach-tumbler finale. The book keeps asking, half in parenthesis, whether a given bird is an omen: "two bird references (omens?)," crows' slow flight "perhaps another bird omen," a bird shitting on Pemulis's windshield ("is this an omen?"). Lenz inverts the Jacuzzi bird by feeding one down a garbage disposal, and pointedly "doesn't pause to consider whether his fallen bird might be an omen" (p. 547). Meanwhile beak-and-predator imagery attaches to mothers and hunters alike — Avril's "maternal beak" at the terminal window, Rusk "bird-of-prey-faced," Avril figured as a brooding gull with "head under wing." The system links the accidental dead bird to fate, guilt, and the question of who is watching for signs.