grief is the thing with feathers by max porter

He’s the desperate fantasy of a bereaved Ted Hughes scholar an endlessly repurposed creature of folklore a lush physical presence (“Feathers … rich smell of decay … one shiny jet-black eye … blinking slowly, in a leathery wrinkled socket”) and a puckish literary device. Then in struts Crow.Ĭrow, as well as being a crow, is a bully, a therapist, a trickster and a nurse: “friend, excuse, deus ex machina, joke, symptom, figment, spectre, crutch”.

Recovery – indeed, forward motion of any kind – seems impossible. Dad sits “alone in the/ living room wondering what to do”, dismantled by a grief that feels “fourth-dimensional, abstract, faintly familiar” the boys are bemused by the disjunction between the vastness of their catastrophe and the world’s muted response: the unaccountable lack of “crowds and. Suddenly, inexplicably, a woman has died, leaving behind her a husband and two young sons. His book – a freewheeling hybrid of novella, poem, essay and play-for-voices – opens on a scene of desolation. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Porter’s astonishing debut, which has been longlisted for the Guardian first book award, is set in a similar sort of family at a similar point in time, but the mirror it holds up to his own life is a cracked and mottled one, returning a reflection that’s fatally distorted and drained of light. This is family at its most nuclear, and its most complete. Coming in from the street, it’s like stepping into a Technicolor snapshot of that moment in midlife when, if you’re lucky, you find yourself at the heart of things when the children are young and the parents not yet old. We pass the living room, where Porter’s two older sons smile from the sofa in the kitchen, he and his wife hand the baby back and forth as they make tea and fetch biscuits out of cupboards papered with playschool works of art. “He’s lovely isn’t he lovely?” he asks, beaming, before we’re halfway down the hall. M ax Porter answers the door with his arms full of chuckling, wriggling four-month-old.

Grief is the thing with feathers by max porter