The book:
There really is something wonderful about discovering a new writer who has the capacity to surprise and delight in equal measure. Max Porter fits the bill wonderfully. His debut novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, is a remarkable read. Each carefully chosen word perfectly fits its context. It flits like the crow. It struggles to express deep grief when focussing on the father, yet manages to bring it beautifully to the page.
A novel influenced by poetry - both in its subject matter (drawn from both Ted Hughes and Emily Dickinson) and its style, it is a profoundly moving read. We really hope you like it.
In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother’s sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and the pain of loss gives way to memories, the little unit of three starts to heal.
What the Guardian thought:
Oh, the look of a book! Whether a novel’s weight and the appearance of its typeface indicate the heft of traditional narrative ambition or a lighter, more poetic hesitancy and compression; whether we see block text and the roll call of chapters marching down a table of contents or lots of white space and a glancing, ragged-looking assemblage of pages: the feel and appearance of the story has a huge influence on our reading expectations.
Not every writer is interested in these kinds of distinctions, of course, but Max Porter certainly is. His Grief Is the Thing With Feathers is the most exquisite little flight of a story captured between hardback covers, and its appearance has been crafted to show us that we are in for something unusual. This deeply moving book about death and its grief-stricken consolations – love and art – appears to be no more than a scattering of text, dialogue and poetry that lifts and settles on the page, the frailest sort of thing. Yet as we read on, we become aware that the way it has been put together is robust indeed.
For starters, there is the title, referring to a well-known poem by Emily Dickinson, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”. Then there’s the story itself, of a grieving writer and father of two young boys, who is coming to terms with the death of his wife while writing a book about Ted Hughes called Ted Hughes’ Crow on the Couch: A Wild Analysis. Altogether, from the typography of the cover to the poet who is the subject of the protagonist’s writing, to the “Crow” who arrives in the middle of the night in “a rich smell of decay, a sweet furry stink of just-beyond-edible food, and moss, and leather, and yeast”, flying straight out of Hughes’s poetry into the role of caretaker for the family, amanuensis and analyst, there’s a glorious conceit at play here.
But the book is much more than the sum of its parts. Risking the rigours of its intellectual and aesthetic endeavour through extreme compression, Porter’s story becomes a profound meditation on the difficulty of writing about love and loss. The only way to do it is ... to begin. So, random memories, thoughts, scraps of conversations become the book. In the end, it’s Crow itself, that “thing with feathers”, that forces articulation, wresting narrative from out of a private place and putting it on to the page.
The story shifts between three points of view – “Dad”, “Boys”, “Crow” – and is arranged in three sections, each with its own music and character, veering from violent jeering and upset to drama, resolution and benediction. Sprinkling his wife’s ashes, the father hears in his sons’ voices “the life and song of their mother. Unfinished. Beautiful. Everything.”
Splitting an already slim volume three ways by three adds to the featherlight impression of the whole. We flit from one section to the next, as mighty themes are laid down, while humour and the domestic quotidian are never far away. In this, Porter’s tone and subject are reminiscent of recent poetry collections also addressing the loss of love, Christopher Reid’s A Scattering and Sharon Olds’ Stag’s Leap. But this book that looks and reads like a collection of poetry is very much a novel; a complex poetic grouping of ideas and images that is as easy to read as a children’s story. Finally, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers shows us another way of thinking about the novel and its capabilities, taking us through an emotionally fraught subject, one airy page after another, as though transported by wings.
Kirsty Gunn - Read the full review
If you liked this, then try:
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Crow by Ted Hughes
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Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
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My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
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