Short, charming and
harmless, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, the debut novel from English writer
Max Porter, is short enough to finish in a day, but also quite intoxicating and
deeply moving. Not so much a novel as a prose poem or even a stage play, this
book reminded me a lot of what Mark Z. Danielewski is doing right now with
books like Only Revolutions and The Fifty Year Sword, only here it is much
easier to swallow and is also quite good, even funny at times. While it’s
scattershot style and stream of consciousness narration tended to keep a lot of
the emotional impact of what is a very dramatic story at arm’s length at least
for me, it has enough intrigue packed within its short, oddly laid out pages to
make the short trip worthwhile. At the beginning of the book, a man and his two
sons are reeling from the sudden death of their mother. When the man answers
the door, thinking it might be another unwanted mourner or past friend of his
wife, a crow greets him. The crow’s size
is never made clear, but he is strong and knocks the man out, claiming that he
will not leave the house until they work things out. Soon, the man begins work
on his Ted Hughes biography, and the two boys slowly climb out of the bubble of
make believe and accept the world around him. The crow is an interesting
character, the most interesting since Murakami’s giant frog. He is a passive
observer of things, fascinated by human grief. We learn of some past events of
the trio’s life, such as the dad’s embarrassing meeting with the subject of his
biography and the boy’s trepidation toward those their dad dates after their
mom’s death. Not a slam-dunk by any means, this short novel wastes little of
your time and is guaranteed to put a smile on your face.
Rating: 4/5
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