Tinkers by Paul Harding (Winner, 2010)

Tinkers is a quiet book concerning human connection, death, and simplicity of action. The main character, George, is on his death bed, surrounded by his life, his family, and most importantly his thoughts. George remembers his father, long dead, who worked as a peddler of pots, thread, soap and the like. He remembers his father's work as a presence in his customer's lives, frequently performing acts of service outside his sales. One particular moving story is about his father's sales to a hermit named Gilbert – or Gilbert the Hermit as some people referred to him. Gilbert bought twine and tobacco from George's father, who walked into the woods to sell it to him every year. One year, George's father meets Gilbert with twine and tobacco but Gilbert begs, with grunts and hand motions, for help removing a tooth. George's father at first refuses, then peforms the bloody, rudimentary surgery with a pair of pliers and some corn whiskey. Afterwards Gilbert the Hermit is so grateful he leaves a generous gift, late at night, at George's father's door– an early inscribed copy of the Scarlet Letter that the hermit had from his  previous life, which were rumored to include years of friendship with Nathaniel Hawrhorne at Bowdoim college. George's father is touched. When he goes at to meet Gilbert the next year, with twine and tobacco, the hermit does not appear. Eventually the woods tell George's father that Gilbert died in the winter, and his body is back in the earth. And on his deathbed, George continues to think, to remember, and to wait for his turn.

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Laura's Review - Tinkers

George Crosby remembered many things as he died, but in an order he  could not control.  (p. 18)

Tinkers is about George Crosby's final days.  Lying in bed in the front room of his house, surrounded by family, he takes a mental journey through his life, as well as his father's.  His thoughts meander in a mostly slow and meditative way.  The prose is richly descriptive and even dreamlike in places:

The afternoon became warm, and with the warmth the first bees appeared, and each little bee settled in a yellow cup and took suck like  newborn. Howard stopped Prince Edward, even though he was behind in his rounds, and gave the mule a carrot and stepped into the field full of flowers and bees, who seemed not to mind his presence in the least, who seemed, in fact, in their spring thrall, to be unaware of his presence at all.  Howard closed his eyes and inhaled. He smelled cold water and cold, intrepid green.  Those early flowers smelled like cold water. Their fragrance was not the still perfume of high summer; it was the mineral smell of cold, raw green.  (p. 60)

Throughout his adult life, George carefully concealed the scars left by his father's abandonment.  On his deathbed it all comes back to him, but he also begins to see that paternal abandonment, while manifested in different forms, goes back at least two generations.  At 80, George has broken the cycle.  And he has inherited a more positive, useful quality:  that of a "tinker."  George's father sold goods to country folk and handled all manner of small repairs along the way.  George repairs clocks, and his memories are interrupted by excerpts from an 1870s clock repair manual.

I first heard about Tinkers when it won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize  for Fiction, and I couldn't wait to read it.  This type of book is typically right up my street.  Unfortunately, I was  disappointed.  I just couldn't get into  the rhythm.  Maybe it was my mood.  Or perhaps it was because I kept comparing it to two other  books I loved, which explore similar themes: Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Home.  Whatever the reason, and despite the beautiful writing, something about Tinkers fell short for me.




 My original review can be found here.

Review: Tinkers

Title: Tinkers

Author: Paul Harding

Published: 2009, Bellevue Literary Press
Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Accolades: 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Spoiler Alert

George is dying. He has lived a long and fruitful life, but he has one regret - he has lost contact with his father who left George's family when George was a boy. As his body slowly shuts down his mind loses it's concept of time and his thoughts begin to wander from past to present as he recounts the moments and people who have shaped him.

In his first novel Paul Harding has written an original story about family and lose. The story is free flowing because it is the random thoughts of a man who is lying in his hospital bed dying. The story line changes back and forth between past and present as George thinks about his life and his hobby "tinkering" with old clocks and George's father Howard who was a "tinker" who traveled throughout northern Maine and Canada. Once you understand the pattern of this patternless book the imagery and the ethereal style of Harding's writing is almost magical. When trying to understanding the coldness of George's mother Harding lets you into her deepest thoughts - the thoughts one even hides from oneself:

" It is winter, and the tree has been stripped of its bright mantle of leaves. It is winter because she lies awake with a bare heart, trying to remember a full season. She thinks, I must have been a young woman once." (page 88, Tinkers)

When Harding explains why Howard left his family and never came back, he does it by comparing Howard's new wife and the wife he left in one powerfully written sentence:

"Howard brought her flowers every day, and oranges... He lifted his nose from a crate of limes, refreshed and eager to get home to a wife who spoke words out loud as she thought them up and held nothing to whirl and eddy to collect in brackish silences, silences that broke like thin ice beneath you to announce your drowning." (page 174, Tinkers)

I really enjoyed reading this book. It is a book of many layers that left me thinking about it days after I read it. I don't keep many books that I read, but I will keep this one to reread when I want delve into another layer of this powerful book.

My Rating: 5 out of 5

Tinkers - Wendy's Review

He tinkered. Tin pots, wrought iron. Solder melted and cupped in a clay dam. Quicksilver patchwork. Occasionally, a pot hammered back flat, the tinkle of tin sibilant, tiny beneath the lid of the boreal forest. Tinkerbird, coppersmith, but mostly a brush and mop drummer. – from Tinkers, page 12 -

George Washington Crosby is eight days from death on the opening page of Tinkers - he is hallucinating and remembering, he is pondering his life and the life of his father. George has spent his life fixing clocks – and time plays a crucial role in this novel about fathers and sons, and connections with others. While George lays dying from cancer, he reflects on the small things which have made up his life, including the house he has lovingly built and the intricate details of clock repair.

Read the names etched onto the works: Ezra Bloxham – 1794; Geo. E. Tiggs – 1832; Thos. Flatchbart – 1912. Lift the darkened works from the case. Lower them into ammonia. Lift them out, nose burning, eyes watering, and see them shine and star through your tears. File the teeth. Punch the bushings. Load the spring. Fix the clock. Add your name. – from Tinkers, page 15 -

But Tinkers is not just George’s story…it is the story of three interconnected generations of men: George’s father Howard (an epileptic), and Howard’s father who suffered from dementia. Narrated alternatively between these three points of view, the story is nonlinear.

Howard is a dreamer and a tinker, a man who relishes the beauty of nature and spends whole days picking wildflowers and constructing art from twigs and grass. His seizures come when he least expects them, and eventually tear apart his fragile marriage. George’s memories of Howard are of a father often mysteriously late coming home, and one frightening episode of Howard seizing at Christmas dinner.

Howard’s father is a minister whose slow descent into dementia confuses his son who describes his father as ‘a strange, gentle man.‘ Howard’s loss of his father mirrors George’s loss of Howard.

Harding’s prose is like reading a long, narrative poem. Beautifully constructed sentences and stories within stories characterize Tinkers. Often the story feels like water in a river – rippled, unpredictable, dipping around corners and eddying around obstructions…and so, Harding’s use of water as a symbol in the novella seems appropriate.

The overriding themes of Harding’s Pulitzer Prize winning effort are that of time passing, the dreams of men, and the passage from life to death.

What of miniature boats constructed of birch bark and fallen leaves, launched onto cold water clear as air? How many fleets were pushed out toward the middles of ponds or sent down autumn brooks, holding treasures of acorns, or black feathers, or a puzzled mantis? Let those grassy crafts be listed alongside the iron hulls that cleave the sea, for they are all improvisations built from the daydreams of men, and all will perish, whether from ocean siege or October breeze. - from Tinkers, page 78 -

I enjoyed this slim book whose size belies the depth of the prose. This is a beautiful story which reads more like a meditation than a novel. Full of lyrical phrases, it is not always an easy book to understand, and yet it is a deeply satisfying read.

Readers who are not intimidated by literary novels which use symbolism and metaphor liberally to explore deeper issues, will want to read Tinkers. This is a novel which left me thinking about the characters long after I turned the final page.

Highly recommended.