“It was very private. There was no end result. There was no product in mind. It was just an experiment to begin with,” says Max Porter about the unique form of his novel Grief Is The Thing With Feathers – Dua’s Monthly Read for April. In this lyrical, surreal meditation on loss – in which a crow guides a father and his sons through the grief of losing their wife and mother – Max Porter tears up the rule book of what a novel should be.
In his conversation with Dua for this month’s Service95 Book Club interview (which you can watch in full via the link below) they discuss Max’s playful approach to novel writing: the experimental form and the impact of Crow. “The thing about Crow is that he’s yours to make your own mind up about,” says Max. “Someone once said, ‘Oh, yeah, I get it, he’s a metaphor for grief.’ And that is one interpretation of him. He’s also real. He’s also a study of care. He’s also their babysitter. He’s also a study of domesticity. I hope he’s also a joke.”
Dua and Max also talk about the profound effect the book has had on readers. “Ten years after this book [came out], a great many people have shared with me their pain; the loss of their family. It’s opened an incredibly and infinitely interesting doorway to the good stuff – the true stuff,” says Max.
Writer George Saunders has described the ending of the book as “absolutely preposterous”, but Max offers a deeper insight: “I think endings are a problem because they’re false things. It’s not an ending that works on its own, because you have to have gone to the very unstable ground; the moments of total insanity, the moments of real heartbreak, in order to earn or understand this uplift.”
Watch Dua’s full interview with Max here
