I was friend, excuse, deus ex machina, joke, symptom, figment, specter, crutch, toy, phantom, gag, analyst and babysitter.”Ĭrow is also a literary device, “a myth to be slipped in,” and one that owes a substantial debt to its progenitor, one of literature’s most famous widowers. We can do things other characters can’t, like eat sorrow, un-birth secrets and have theatrical battles with language and God. Perfect devices: doctors, ghosts and crows. Standing against the family’s slow-moving grief, Crow is a dynamic presence, a trickster of multiple guises, a vanishing mediator that moves into the household in order to guide it toward recovery: “In other versions I am a doctor or a ghost. Porter divides his narrative into sections voiced by the father, sons and the figure of Crow. The result is a book that has the living, breathing quality of the title’s “thing with feathers.”

He has an excellent ear for the flexibility of language and tone, juxtaposing colloquialisms against poetic images and metaphors. Porter resists the static register of the maudlin, creating instead a fabric of constant shifts and calibrations in voice, moving from rage to madness to profanity and humor.

Much of the novel takes place within a domestic sphere both occupied and diminished by loss, run by a father functioning as a “machine-like architect of routines for small children with no Mum.”Īlthough charged throughout with high emotion, the novel is rarely sentimental. However, there is nothing indirect about the tragedy Porter stages: the sudden death of a wife and mother, and the grief of the husband and sons she left behind. In Max Porter’s first novel, “Grief Is the Thing With Feathers,” the bird in question takes the form of a metafictional crow, a reference to Ted Hughes that winds its way through this brief novel. Above all, they are signs of trouble to come, or trouble already arrived.

Paper, $14.Ĭoleridge’s albatross, Poe’s raven, Hitchcock’s homicidal flock and Iñárritu’s costumed Birdman: Birds act as figures of prophecy, manifestations of trauma, voices of the superego.

GRIEF IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS By Max Porter 114 pp.

Grief has feathers