Review Written and Edited Peter Buller
Expressions of grief and mourning are often complicated by a distrust and disdain for despair. Depression hangs over one's life like the overcast skies that seem to loom over our lives forever. In light of this, I think contemporary culture tends to brush away any hint that clouds might move in on their otherwise clear days; yet doing so seems to quash one's need to express--and, in time, expel--the sorrow staining the oxygen passing through our lungs. Depression never passes over in the night, much like the rain derided in the small-talk shared with strangers. It would be a mistake to suggest that Max Porter's Grief Is the Thing with Feathers is just a novel where one learns to endure grief, though; for in many ways Porter's story reinvents the typical structure and pacing of the novel so as to reimagine the expression of grief, making the stifling nature of depressive storms less a force to endure than an inspiration to dance through the life one leads a little differently.
Those who make the wise choice of picking up this book, though, will probably first notice its intricate pace. Porter's prose hops from one phrase to the next, skipping about mid-sentence as though written by a murder of crows with different interests.
Very romantic, how we first met. Badly behaved. Trip trap. Two-bed upstairs flat, spit-level, slight barbed-error, snuck in easy through the wall and up to the attic bedroom to see those cotton boys silently sleeping, intoxicating hum of innocent children, lint, flack, gack-pack-nack, the whole place was heavy mourning, every surface dead Mum, every crayon, tractor, coat, welly, covered in a film of grief.There is a scatter-brained gait to his prose, introduced by Crow, and then becomes jumbled in the entries of the father and his sons. This writing lifts from the normal confines of novelistic prose into one that prances, dances, and packages words into carefully knitted parcels that are absolutely delectable to read.
Breathless and pleasurable as Porter's words may be, the novel ultimately delves into resolving grief and does so with a story equal parts folk tale and magical realism. Interactions between the family and Crow might remind readers of Kafka on the Shore, Murakami's scenes depicting conversations between cats and humans, between Colonel Sanders and a worn-out trucker. Between these scenes and the innocent expressions of the character's everyday life are moments of somber sobriety, when the forgetting stops and anguished remembrances bubble to the surface. "I've drawn her unpicked, ribs splayed stretched like a xylophone with the dead birds playing tunes on her bones." Crow arrives at the apartment to help the family overcome grief, describing himself as "a doctor or a ghost," yet unlike a clinical therapist, becomes actively involved in the tremors wracking the hearts of the dad and his two sons. For as "ripe, rich, and delicious" as it is to "raid such a nest" of sorrow, Crow cannot help but join in the catharsis of grief that wounds and tears as much as it relieves. He recounts a tale where he suggests the children compete in a game to create the best model of their mother. The best one, he says, "I will bring to life." The kids make their models so good that Crow cannot decide, and the wallpaper supporting the fairy tale cracks and peels:
'Crow, which one of these fake mums has won us a real one?'
And Crow was quiet, laughing no more.
Crow, don't be funny, let's have our real Mummy.' And Crow started crying.
And the boys cooked Crow in a very hot oven until he was nothing but cells.
Grief Is the Thing with Feathers plays on the words of an Emily Dickinson poem, "Hope Is the Thing with Feathers." On a whole other level, the novel plays with grander, literary references such as this. The novel begins with another Dickinson poem, edited to accommodate the book's themes:
More explicitly, the father--a scholar of Ted Hughes--interacts with the poet and the literary figures proactive in his literary life. Although the novel deals mostly with him coming to terms with his wife's death, in the background simmers a reflection on this literary scene surrounding accomplished poets like Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. He regales issues relating to scholarship of the two poets, but also a story where his meeting the poet in person flounders when the hosts of Hughes' reading cut off his "more of an essay than a question," for the poet because they were out of time. It's an intrepid moment, and all too familiar for those who longed to engage with literary communities wrapped in academic snobbery and/or elitist institutions. Barriers to entry preclude personal and intellectual exchanges as often as they remove pretensions for idolatries, if not more so. The father's frustrations with the literary scene overlap with his and his sons' grief over losing the family's mother; and this is an intersection that the mysterious Crow both straddles and inspires.
Most readers associate crows with carrion and death, being recognized (along with ravens) as bad omens. The novel enriches this cosmogony by stacking the corvid's affinity for garbage and decay with their ties to ancestry and family bonds. Porter's Crow takes on the role of such a spiritual medium, with all the self-indulgent mischief that makes real crows such tricksters. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers renders these magnificent birds with their most fascinating qualities. This novel should appeal to readers of all kinds, whether they love or jeer, cry or cry foul, play nice or play tricks. For the crows, these things are one and the same; and perhaps also, for Porter's readers.
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