Book Review : Paul Harding - Tinkers (2009)

Country: USA

Genre: Literary

Pages: 191

...I will be no more than a tint of some obscure color, and to their great grandchildren nothing they ever know about, and so what army of strangers and ghosts has shaped and colored me until back to Adam, until back when ribs were blown from molten sand into the glass bits that took up the light of this world...

I know I'm walking right into a book reviewer cliché here, but TINKERS is not easy to review. In order to use that cliché instead of being a victim of it, I'll try and explain why it is so. Although, I'm not sure it's going to work. It's not that TINKERS is overly complicated, because it's not. It just walks to its own drum, if I can say so. While I thought the lack of structure felt a little deliberate, Paul Harding's first novel's power lies in its original approach of a cliché theme, the elder on his deathbed. It's the first novel I read about dying that is about the process of loss of life, rather than the tragedy of it. That very idea dragged me the hell away from my comfort zone, but it wasn't unpleasant at all. In fact, it's refreshing to see such boldness rewarded with literary awards. I have my reserves about TINKERS, but it was a positive experience.

Using the term "story" for TINKERS has to be done carefully. There is a setting, a premise, but there is no real coherent story structure. What you have to know is that George Washington Crosby, an elderly clock repairman, is about to die. Literally, is on his deathbed, waiting for the grim reaper and TINKERS is tracing back the last eight days of his life, from his perspective. There is no telling as if George is senile or if he's experiencing a DMT influx from his extreme condition*, but TINKERS is a series of memories and visions he experiences, as he's dying. They are those fresh, long, trippy and larger-than-life descriptions of his childhood and of his relationship to his father Howard. There's no "bigger-picture" to those visions, except the meaning it has to George, which you have to extract from the page. Harding has a luxuriant style, but he has a thing for understatement and trusts his reader's instinct.

Be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.**

It's a given that Paul Harding writes beautifully. He's an alumni from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and he taught creative writing at Harvard of all places. Picking up the book and reading the back cover, you would expect as much. But TINKERS lives and dies through every other element it has to offer. While the premise is taken from a completely original angle and there are those passages that made me drop to one knee (as featured above this paragraph), the deliberate lack of structure got under my skin. I got the feeling that Harding just tried to show off his style and Whitmanesque descriptions (really, Whitmanesque is the best way to describe this) rather than actually go somewhere with his narration. But I'll give that to him, he's very honest in foreshadowing how it actually ends, in order to free himself from structural responsibilities. It's hard to complain about this, because Harding literally warns you in the first line.

Usually, a first novel doesn't get a writer much recognition. That's why I like to start reading a writer from his first publications, because it can only get better from there. In Harding's case, TINKERS won the freakin' Pulizter. I understand why it won and it's a commendable move from the Pulitzer people to reward such a bold and difficult novel, but it's still a first novel, so I am ready to overlook the tortuous narrative of TINKERS. Harding's next novel  (according to his Wikipedia page) will star George's daughter Kate and his grandson Charlie. Now that's intriguing. I have no idea how he's going to tie it up with the process-of-dying novel that TINKERS is, but it's a promising idea. TINKERS is very short, but it's a challenge to your senses. Paul Harding could become an all-time great if he can channel this luxuriant prose into a tighter narrative. Interesting, but very off-beat read.

* The DMT in the human brain is often held responsible for near-death visions of  somebody's life "passing before their eyes"


** Beautiful, isn't it? I read literature for passages like this, that exposes in clear words something that has been on my mind for a long time.