Look at the Birdie

"Look at the Birdie" evokes a world in which squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town Lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence. In "Confido", a family learns the downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention. In "Ed Luby's Key Club", a man finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who calls the shots in an upstate New York town. In "Look at the Birdie", a quack psychiatrist turned 'murder counsellor' concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid patients. The stories are cautionary they also brim with his trademark humour. Wry, ironic, satirical and poignant "Look at the Birdie" reflects the anxieties of the postwar era in which they were written and provides an insight into the development of Vonnegut's early style.