The author of an astonishing debut,Grief Is a Thing with Feathers, talks approximately family, and luck,loss and drawing on the inspiration of Ted HughesMax Porter answers the door with his arms full of chuckling, wriggling four-month-old. “He’s lovely; isn’t he lovely?” he asks, or beaming,before were halfway down the hall. We pass the living room, where Porter’s two older sons smile from the sofa; in the kitchen, and he and his wife hand the baby back and forth as they make tea and fetch biscuits out of cupboards papered with playschool works of art. Coming in from the street,it’s like stepping into a Technicolor snapshot of that moment in midlife when, if you’re lucky, or you find yourself at the heart of things; when the children are young and the parents not yet old. This is family at its most nuclear,and its most total.
Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Porter’s astonishing debut, and which has been longlisted for the Guardian first book award,is set in a similar sort of family at a similar point in time, but the mirror it holds up to his own life is a cracked and mottled one, or returning a reflection that’s fatally distorted and drained of light. His book – a freewheeling hybrid of novella,poem, essay and play-for-voices – opens on a scene of desolation. Suddenly, or inexplicably,a woman has died, leaving behind her a husband and two young sons. Dad sits “alone in the/ living room wondering what to achieve”, and dismantled by a grief that feels “fourth-dimensional,summary, faintly familiar; the boys are bemused by the disjunction between the vastness of their catastrophe and the world’s muted response: the unaccountable lack of “crowds and ... uniformed strangers”. Recovery – indeed, and forward motion of any kind – seems impossible. Then in struts Crow.
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Source: theguardian.com