The Thumbnail Book Reviews

by John Q McDonald --- 25 January 2009

Tinkers

by Paul Harding

None of us knows when death will come. None of us knows what will be going through our mind when it happens. Hopefully, it will come peacefully and quietly, so that we might have a little time to reflect on the magnitude of the moment. Hopefully, our last thought will not be a two-word expletive beginning with "Oh...!" And none of us particularly likes to even contemplate this inevitability. No matter what our literature says, whatever it teaches, no one of us can possibly imagine what it is really like, what it will be really like. Through the imagination of our artists and writers, there are small windows into knowledge and wisdom of the one reality of all our lives. Of course, this often results in fairly dark art and literature. It hardly bears contemplation. And yet, death also drives some of the greatest, most meaningful and powerful of our literature. Which brings us to Tinkers a novel that reflects upon death and life in an intense and impressionistic story and atmosphere. George Washington Crosby is an old man on his death bed. The first line in the novel tells us he has but eight days to live, which, we're told is also the amount of time a wound up clock takes to wind down again. This is significant to George, who took up clock repair after his retirement. The metaphor may seem obvious, but Harding gently and potently weaves the intricacies of clock repair into George's reflections on his life. We go on George's journey. For many a long year, he has refrained from thinking much about his father, Howard, who was a wandering tinker in the Maine woods in the early years of the 20th century. And, so, while we are there, in the room as George's life ebbs, we also journey with Howard in the snowy gray forests, selling kitchen items and tools for pennies, happening along to help with the occasional burial or dental work. Howard is also an epileptic, his wife is tired of dealing with his regular seizures, and the kids are baffled when they finally witness a grand mal over a prize ham. George's mother considers having Howard institutionalized. The threat gives Howard pause, and we now enter upon the life of his own father, a preacher who faded out of Howard's life like a sun-bleached photograph. Harding makes the environment, the clocks and the woods, the sky and muddy streams, vivid metaphors for the hardness of these lives, the hardness of life in general. In its greatest moments, of which there are many, this book evokes some of the deepest meaning in life, how we impart meaning to it merely by enduring, merely by deciding to go on, to face it and its bleakest inevitabilities. Seeking out the almost mystical workings of the clock that runs within each of us, Harding surrenders to some excesses in his imagery and dreamy qualities, but, when he stays rooted to the landscape of a wintry forest, or that of the three generations he describes, his writing and its meanings evoke Proust and Faulkner. The book is moving and elegiac, even humorous at times, but, like the best books, never wanders far from its project of taking us to the threshold between life and eternity.

(For this book, Harding was awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.)

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Also by Harding: [Enon]