The novel is certainly about grief, telling the story of a young father of two boys whose wife has just died unexpectedly, and who is understandably consumed by his grief. The prose was so unlike anything I’d heard before that I felt like I had to read it immediately – easy enough to do since the book is a scant 114 pages – to see how Porter could stretch that lyrical yet dark language into something the length of a novella. Fforde didn’t take it very seriously, naming the owner’s manual for his car, but Mitchell recommended a book by Max Porter called Grief is the Thing with Feathers, reading a passage from it as part of his allotted time.

The dad recalls the harmonious feeling of lives shared early in his marriage, “when our love was settling into the shape of our lives like cake mixture reaching the corners of the tin as it swells and bakes.” The boys, dismayed at how protectively adults coddle them against the reality of their mother’s death, wonder, “Where are the fire engines? Where is the noise and clamour of an event like this?” The powerful emotions evoked in this novel will resonate with anyone who has experienced love, loss, and mourning.I recently included a link to a podcast that featured authors David Mitchell and Jasper Fforde where, at the end of the program(me), they each had to recommend one book and make the case for it in some brief period of time – I think it was three minutes – after which the host would choose the winner.

Porter’s characters express their feelings through observations that are profound and simply phrased. The husband has been recently contracted to write a study of Ted Hughes’s Crow (written after the death of Sylvia Plath, who is also referenced here), and like the Hughes’s trickster Crow, this Crow shifts shape and personality to address the changing needs of the different family members. Events are presented from the viewpoint of three characters: a recently widowed dad, his two young boys, and a talking crow who, like Poe’s raven, roosts in their house as a tangible symbol of the family’s need to come to terms with their loss. Porter’s first novel is a heartbreaking and life-affirming meditation on the dislocating power of grief.

Grief has feathers