In H Is for Hawk, the English writer Helen Macdonald tries to release herself into the wilds of her own grief by adopting, raising, and hunting alongside a goshawk. Her hands snap the necks of the captured pheasants and rabbits; her hawk’s talons strip out the viscera for the feast. There is blood. Lots of blood. The reviews on this book are unanimous: The book is good, very good, period, full stop. I read some reviews months ago and became part of the pack of readers who attacked the book the minute it was finally available a few weeks ago in the United States. I am still not finished with it. (I am close.) I’m slogging, not enjoying. I can see that it’s beautifully made, like a piece of avant-garde glass engraved with geometric designs, all sharp edges and icy gleam. I want to love it.
As Macdonald has experienced the death of her father over and over again in the hands of readers across America in these past weeks, I have experienced the bloodshot days of the life of my firstborn. Macdonald’s bloodlust, my bloodlove. They say birth and death are made of the same stuff, and “they” seem right.
Macdonald is on a quest to follow her father wherever he has gone after this life. The book is her attempt at the great escape. Her state of mind will be familiar to anyone who has lived alongside the death of someone close—the death continues after it has happened. She’s consumed by a presence made of absence, by a somebody who has become a speck out there in the distance, about to dissolve. Her eyes focus on that faraway point, blind to everything closer. Pushed out of the human world, she runs into the forest of the hawk.
What I learned these past months is that when a baby is born, he is still not quite here yet. He is traveling, on his way from that same faraway point. His mother’s eyes are trained on his movement. But he lands in soft blankets, not in a pile of blood and guts on cold ground. Maybe that difference is all there is to the fact that I’m not connecting with H Is for Hawk. I’m still finding it to be the engraved glass rather than the intoxicating liquor inside.
There is also the problem of the hype around H Is for Hawk. Pity the work of art that arrives on a red velvet pillow carried in a procession. Usually I’m not a torn-apart body leaking milk and leaning desperately toward any pillow I can find. Usually I’m the critic. Sometimes I’m part of the procession, and I know it. I know when I’m praising something everyone likes. Are we right or are we just the majority? I’m imagining Kant’s idea—and this is paraphrasing, but I think you get the idea—that a hungry person has no business appraising a still-life painting of food. Neediness of any kind does not make for good criticism. Or maybe it’s just important to note in a review, I was hungry, I was tired, I was in my own pool of bloodlove, I’m not the objectivity you’re looking for. How embarrassing all that is. How contingent. How, in this case, female. (Would criticism be more interesting if, at least sometimes, critics admitted to being messes?)
Being torn limb from limb, being torn in half by a son, being pulled by death into bloody fights with beady-eyed creatures—none of these things feels quite human, after all. This is Macdonald’s conclusion as she realizes she will have to make her way back to her former home among people, and written language and books. Human living always contracts away from the mess of the extremes.
H Is for Hawk is a very good book, maybe especially if you are not in a very bloody place right this minute. 
