If language pecks at your soft tissue, then curls warmly against the tattered flesh—

If your roles of child and caregiver slip and grind against each other like the convergence of tectonic plates—

—then you should tumble into the world of Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter, his 2015 debut novel.

Grief is the Thing with Feathers weaves through the sorrows of a father and his two sons following the death of the boys’ mother. At the onset of their grief, a rancid crow, named Crow, pays them a visit and wastes no time in demonstrating its boorishness. Crow uses mockery, vulgarity, and linguistic gamesmanship, binding emotional ambivalence to the promise that he won’t leave until the family doesn’t need him anymore. The narrative is powered by the rotation of voices between Dad, Crow, and Boys, the characterization of the boys’ collective identities. The grief that connects these three characters orchestrates their adaptation to the mundane, tragic, and humorous incidents that they face in subsequent years. Their voices slip into one another, as do their roles as caretaker, dependents, and transgressor. This is a short novel at just 113 pages, but the three voices generate vignettes that venture far beyond the text on the page. Grief is the Thing with Feathers explores that which remains buoyant when the scaffolding crumbles beneath us.

Crow

intoxicating hum of innocent children, lint, flack, gack-pack-nack, the whole place was heavy mourning. 

When I stood behind the pulpit, the eyes that steadied on me felt more abstract than material. They numbered in the hundreds, a fact that, like a tool excavated from a buried past, was as admirable as it was useless. There were roughly 1000 words that I had written on my mother’s life. I had imagined my words slicing scarlet cuts, which we would bear together as one body, but when I bent the microphone toward me, the bodies in the room fell to the backdrop. I was left with the words that I had written and the lingering wonder about a life denied its natural conclusion. The two forces, a text and a wonder, filled the room with their struggle. They slipped past each other, airy in their movement while also dense in their occupation. When I looked out to the crowd, prompted by the marks I had prepared on my manuscript, I saw the sluggishness of my premeditated thoughts as they wrestled with the wonder of the here and now. My words pinned down the wonder for a moment, only for the moment to buck and slither from its grasp. But still, they fought on. They wrestled like dogs on the carpet. They wrestled like Gods in the sky. They wrestled in our hearts until my breath gave out. Soon, the words lost their flight, and the wonder settled between us, pressing our sides with its prickly digits.

Dad

Various other things slipped. We pissed on the seat. We never shut drawers. We did these things to miss her, to keep loving her.

It was January 15th, the day that my mother passed. I wrote in the obituary that she passed away “at her place of residence.” Technicality can bear comfort, but only as much as is necessary. Mom’s birthday was sometime in early November, the exact date just as blurry as it had always been. Her birthday was only few days apart from my grandmother’s, so I had always welded the two days into a singular approximation. This year I didn’t have to check for her birthday on Facebook at the turn of the month. It had been well-considered in my family’s group chat. On her birthday, we couldn’t all get together as we had promised, but the “love you” texts that we exchanged packaged the feelings best shared and consumed all at once. I paid little mind to the grinding and turning that produced the meat condensed in each message.

Emojis made the chat pretty, though. She would have liked that. There were firm ways to be there for each other, no matter how small.

Boys

We knew we weren’t getting straight answers when we asked ‘where is Mum?’... We guessed and understood that this was a new life and Dad was a different type of Dad and we were different boys.

During her lifetime, her names were fluid to my siblings and me. “Mom” was the most matter of fact; a cracker is still a cracker when it’s dipped in honey. “Mother” made me feel like the boarding school kid that I pretended I wasn’t. “Ma” could work, but not without Marlboro Reds or a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in hand. We, my sister most of all, also called her Heidi. Heidi our mom, Heidi our friend, Hydropower when she was on our asses over homework or chores. Heidi was a young mom. She had us at the ages of 15, 18, and 22. Heidi was a cool mom. She knew about our lovers and the Smirnoff in our Poland Spring bottles. She knew our dreams and convinced us that we could stretch ourselves for them, no matter how fantastic they were. She held whatever we brought to her and gave it back to us just a little bit lighter. Yeah, “Heidi” is good, but I hope I never have to settle on it.

Crow

We drank Prosecco and she said I could have my birthday present early. It was the plastic crow. We made love and I kissed her shoulder blades and reminded her of the story of my parents lying to me about children growing up with wings and she said, “my body is not bird-like.”

My wife asked me if I ever dream about my mom. “Yeah, of course,” I said.

“Do you know what she says to you?”

“You know I never remember my dreams.”

Dad

No shape or light, no form at all, just a stench.

I can’t cook for shit, so peanut butter and jelly became a staple meal while my wife visited her family in Seoul. I used a spoon to spread the peanut butter so that my dog could lick the remains—we kept our youthful indulgences a secret between us. One evening, when the primary PB&J proved insufficient, I brought the container to my desk to inhale globs of peanut butter and continue my classwork. I swallowed too big of a bite and immediately knew I had fucked up. I rushed to my phone, fighting through the violence that had crouched behind the bite of childhood joy. Everything went dim besides myself and the breath that my fingers tingled for. I was hunched over, arms stilted on my knees, praying for a miraculous rush of viscosity, when instinct took over. My legs carried me to the toilet and my vomit expelled the chunk in a single heave. I finished the sandwich right after and threw the spoon into the sink. My dog didn’t get any peanut butter that night.

Boys

Now my tiny son shouts ‘cra’ when he sees a crow, because when I see a crow I shout KRAAAA.

I only had a few MFA applications left to complete when my mother passed. Churning out statements of purpose whirled literary jargon through my head. What aesthetics do I want my work to carry? How can my characters feel complex without stalling in perpetual indecision? I thought that writing meant to create a world on the page. According to my high school teachers, I could even learn to build a world in a paragraph, or in a sentence like Hemingway did in “Baby Shoes.” I thought that containment was a device to demonstrate literary capabilities within something enclosed and removed from us. These containers, I thought, can nurture us by fostering our consideration of examinable worlds. This past year has shown me that the stories we carry and pass between us transcend the imagined space and make up the world that we dwell in. Whatever I put onto the page may represent a story, but the story’s body follows the reader. Stories bend each time they revisit us through our daily occupations: an overfilled recycling bin, a booger flicked into a couch’s crevice, burnt chicken over splattering oil. We can decipher a text and examine its elements, but a story is never resolved.

Grief is the Thing with Feathers is best received by surrendering every presumption brought to the text. When I plunge into this story, Porter’s transgressions propel me through an otherwise minimalistic world. When I latch onto Porter’s lyrical prose, I am thankful for my weightlessness in a world stripped of firm ground to settle upon.