Paul Harding - Tinkers

I have so much to say about this book, yet I must admit that my appreciation of it started off oh-so-slowly. Tinkers won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction - not my favourite prize. I know it sounds incredibly snooty to say this (indeed, to 'have' a favourite literary prize at all), but my favourite literary prize is the Man Booker - only because I almost always love the books that win it. I equate the Pulitzer, for some reason, with dry, lofty writing - although I have just looked up a list of past winners and now see that this is completely unfounded: I love Jhumpa Lahiri and Annie Proulx and Carol Shields and Barbara Kingsolver and Geoffrey Eugenides and Junot Diaz and have heard wonderful things about Jennifer Egan, so I have no idea what I was thinking. So maybe, actually, it's because of my recent reading of Steve Hely's cynical take on literary writing that when I started reading this book it was hard for me to absorb the beauty of the language without feeling like it was all a bit too much, a bit try-hard.

Boy did that change.

Tinkers is our bookclub pick for this month, and although I will be away traveling when the Bibliofillies meet, I wanted to participate by at least reading the book, so I soldiered on.

Having reached the end, the words I now want to use to describe Harding's writing are the same words everybody else has already used - lyrical, eligiac, nostalgic. Beautiful. It did not surprise me to learn that Harding is also a musician - you can feel it in the rhythm of his language. It just took me a while to sink into the music of his writing and truly appreciate what I was hearing.

George Washington Crosby, a repairer of clocks, lies dying in the house that he built, surrounded by wife, sisters, children and grandchildren. The unusual nature of the narrative that is to follow is signified by the first line:

"George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died."

The short novel that ensues is a meandering exploration of last thoughts and memories, stories layered within stories, lives overlapping lives and time folding in on itself so that one is left, finally, with indelible impressions of the transient beauty of both life and death, and of the importance of family.

Much of the core of the novel is dedicated to the story of George's father, Howard, told interchangeably in third person and first person. Howard is a peddler of wares, a salesman of oddities who wheels his wagon from town to town, through wood and vale. He is also an epileptic, in an age when this is not well understood or accepted. Certain unconnected moments in Howard's itinerant life are described in detail, and it is these that for me formed the heart of the story: his annual interactions with a silent hermit who, one year, needs his tooth pulled, and who gifts Howard before his death with a signed first edition of The Scarlet Letter, thereby confirming his onetime friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne; the time he reluctantly set out to rescue George and return him home, when George had run away in shock as a young boy after witnessing one of his father's fits; the moment his (Howard's) father, suffering from an ailment of the mind that is described as a ghostly fading away of himself (Altzheimer's?), is removed forever from the family by men clad in black, and which Howard, as a boy, responds to by running into the woods attempting to find the teeth of his father hidden in an ear of corn, the hair of his father in the foliage, eventually sinking into a silt-filled pond and sitting like this, with only his head above water, for a whole night, during which he believes he sees the native American Old Sabbatis sitting similarly submerged, a still head floating on the water across from him, still save for the moment when a whole trout jumps out of the water and into the open mouth of Old Sabbatis. The tales are interwoven like squares on a patchwork quilt, and some take on the nature of fable, so one is not sure, for example, about the veracity of the Nathaniel Hawthorne story, until George, 24 hours from his death, remembers he must tell his family about the signed first edition hidden in a safety deposit box.

I warmed to Howard and, through him, to George, and the reason this book resonated for me, and will continue to resonate long after the reading of it, is that this portrayal of death is as uplifting, somehow, as it is real. I cried when I finished the last page, but not from sadness, and it is hard to explain exactly why or what made me cry. There is a warmth and a relief, I suppose, in the knowledge that life continues in this winding fashion, that through us other lives continue, that through others, our lives will continue, and that the significance of a son to his father and a father to his son is not diminished by age or distance or by death.

At the end of his life George becomes aware of a person in the room with him, when he wakes (or believes he wakes) in the middle of the night. The person is familiar but he cannot identify whether the person is male or female, friend or family. The person, I believe is us, or God, or maybe the point is that God - what we think of as God - is in us, because:

"...the person radiated a sense of possessing hundreds of years, but as a simultaneity: The person contained hundreds of years, but they overlapped, as if the person experienced any number of times at once."

The person says:

"I was just thinking that I am not very many years old, but that I am a century wide. I think that I have my literal age but am surrounded in a radius of years. I think that these years of days, this near century of years, is a gift from you. Thank you."

It is, to me, as though we are physically represented in the story, here - that we are that person, at George's bedside, that by reading this book and understanding his thoughts and the reflections of time upon time, of George and Howard and Howard's father - three generations of men in the same family - we understand that we are both our literal age but that we are also surrounded by a near century of years: not just the century of the lives George brings to us, but the century of those actually around us, and we thank George for the gift of recognition, that this is what is possible in life. We thank Harding for that gift.

A profoundly moving book.

Favourite passages:

There are too many to list, but here are a few moments to remember.

Harding's description of what it feels like to have an epileptic fit is the most memorable I have read since Dostoyevsky - it makes me wonder whether he has personal experience of epilepsy.

"There was also the ring in Howard Crosby's ears, a ring that began at a distance and came closer, until it sat in his ears, then burrowed into them. His head thrummed as if it were a clapper in a bell. Cold hopped onto the tips of his toes and rode on the ripples of the ringing throughout his body until his teeth clattered and his knees faltered and he had to hug humself to keep from unraveling. This was his aura, a cold halo of chemical electricity that encircled him immediately before he was struck by a full seizure. Howard had epilepsy."

Those readers who have difficulty with the non-linear nature of the narrative need look no further than the pages of the book itself to find an explanation for why it is written so:

"George Crosby remembered many things as he died, but in an order he could not control. To look at his life, to take the stock he always imagined a man would at his end, was to witness a shifting mass, the tiles of a mosaic spinning, swirling, reportraying, always in recognizable swaths of colors, familiar elements, molecular units, intimate currents, but also independent now of his will, showing him a different self every time he tried to make an assessment."

The notion (which should be depressing but somehow isn't, here) that all of us are living on borrowed time, fading even as we live:

"So there is my son, already fading. The thought frightened him. The thought frightened him because as soon as it came to him, he knew that it was true. He understood suddenly that even though his son knelt in front of him, familiar, mundane, he was already fading away, receding. His son was fading away before his eyes and that fact was inevitable, even though Howard understood, too, that the fading was yet to begin in any actual sense, that at that moment he and his son the father standing in the dimness, the son kneeling and partly obscured by the charred door, were still only heading, not yet arrived, toward the point where the fading would begin."

Overall assessment: Five out of Five.

Notes:

• I read this as an e-book. Discussion will come, on this blog, about the merits of e-books versus hard copy and all that goes with that debate, but for now: I wish I had read this in paper form. I want a beautiful little hardback version to call my own. There were so many passages I wanted to re-visit, and many times when I wanted to flip back to an earlier section of the book. Also, my feeling generally is that e-books are wonderful for reading genre fiction, but any book of tremendous literary merit - any book requiring some concentration and effort in the reading - is enhanced by a paper format. I think I would have appreciated the language sooner had I been reading paper. And I believe there is a tendency, when reading an e-book, to speed up one's reading - I found myself needing to consciously slow down, go back, read the last sentence again but slower, to take it in properly rather than to simply move past it. Having said all of that, the automatic highlight function of the Kindle app is great, and looking at a single page to see all of one's highlighted passages at the end makes reviewing far easier. Perhaps for a book like this it is in fact worth owning both versions, electronic and paper - what a boon for the publishing industry if this was the conclusion of many readers!

• You have probably all heard this story, but it's a good one and worth repeating. Paul Harding approached many publishers for many years with his manuscript and was repeatedly rejected out of hand. Finally, after Tinkers suffered three years languishing in a desk drawer, a small publisher, the Bellevue Literary Press, agreed to publish the novel. When it was printed it made so little noise that the New York Times failed to review it. And then it won the Pulitzer. Wow. An inspiring story indeed for any aspiring / struggling writer.