Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
A widower, two boys, and a crow that moves in until the mourning is done. Grief given a shape instead of a story.
I won't leave until you don't need me any more.
Max Porter's first book is short and splits its voices three ways: a bereaved father writing a study of Ted Hughes, his two sons speaking sometimes as one, and Crow, who arrives in the flat after the mother dies and installs himself in the household. The register shifts constantly, from tender domestic detail to fable to nonsense verse, and Crow is by turns a trickster, a nanny, a nuisance, and a thing the family half invents to survive.
For a clinician the interest lies in how mourning is staged. Porter refuses a tidy sequence of stages and instead gives grief a body that walks around the rooms, feathered and rude and unpredictable. The father and the boys grieve the same woman in different keys, the adult in language and dread, the children in play and blunt questions. Crow leaves only when the family can hold the loss without him.
About the author
Max Porter
Max Porter, born in 1981, is a British writer. Before turning to fiction, he worked for years as a bookseller and then as an editor at the publishers Granta and Portobello Books, where he edited other authors' novels. He began writing his own work in his thirties. His first book, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, appeared in 2015, followed by Lanny and Shy. His short, poetic novels are widely read and adapted for the stage.
Details
- 2015