Summary
Summary
Pulitzer Prize Winner and New York Times Bestseller
"There are few perfect debut American novels. . . . To this list ought to be added Paul Harding's devastating first book, Tinkers. . . . Harding has written a masterpiece." -- NPR
"In Paul Harding's stunning first novel, we find what readers, writers and reviewers live for." -- San Francisco Chronicle
" Tinkers is truly remarkable." -- Marilynne Robinson , Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Home, Gilead, and Housekeeping
An old man lies dying. Propped up in his living room and surrounded by his children and grandchildren, George Washington Crosby drifts in and out of consciousness, back to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in Maine. As the clock repairer's time winds down, his memories intertwine with those of his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler and his grandfather, a Methodist preacher beset by madness. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, illness, faith, and the fierce beauty of nature.
Paul Harding is the author of two novels about multiple generations of a New England family: the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers and Enon. He has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Harvard University, and Grinnell College. He now lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two sons.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Harding's outstanding debut unfurls the history and final thoughts of a dying grandfather surrounded by his family in his New England home. George Washington Crosby repairs clocks for a living and on his deathbed revisits his turbulent childhood as the oldest son of an epileptic smalltime traveling salesman. The descriptions of the father's epilepsy and the "cold halo of chemical electricity that encircled him immediately before he was struck by a full seizure" are stunning, and the household's sadness permeates the narrative as George returns to more melancholy scenes. The real star is Harding's language, which dazzles whether he's describing the workings of clocks, sensory images of nature, the many engaging side characters who populate the book, or even a short passage on how to build a bird nest. This is an especially gorgeous example of novelistic craftsmanship. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
It will surprise few readers of Tinkers, a Pulitzer prize-winning first novel, that Paul Harding was a student of Marilynne Robinson, who won a Pulitzer for Gilead in 2005. Robinson swept us into the thoughts of a dying old man with deep spiritual resources. Harding does much the same, taking us through the wandering memories of George Washington Crosby. The novel might have been called As He Lay Dying In fact, Harding has something in common with Faulkner: a passionate attachment to place - Maine, in this case, rather than Mississippi - and a sense of time folding in upon itself, often with exhilarating effects. Crosby is a repairer of clocks, a meticulous man, with genuine self-respect as well as the respect of his family and friends, who appear at his bedside in serial fashion to say goodbye. One of these is Nikki Bocheki, "an old acquaintance from the Unitarian church". Like everyone in this novel, she is succinctly drawn: "Nikki was an old woman who dressed like an ageing former starlet whose most dramatic, and final, role was that of the ageing former starlet persevering under the tyranny of time. She was, in fact, a nurse. Once she had chatted with George (who never remembered who she was) and his wife, she shooed the exhausted family from the room. I have three hours before my shift and I can't think of a nicer way to spend it than taking care of this sweet pie." The Faulkneresque manner resonates as Harding slips in and out of dialogue without quotation marks. He jumps from thought to thought, centred in the consciousness of old George but never confined to it. Stories are layered within stories, as when we hear about the "old Budden place" that burns down with the family inside (shades of the Bundren family in As I Lay Dying) or the stories of the various people who came into contact with George's epileptic father, Howard, an old-fashioned peddler - the tinker of the title, whose peripatetic life preoccupies his son in these last eight days. As it would, the mind twists and turns through time, breaking free of it. Harding is good at this, and beautiful moments flash and fade, as in the final scene where George recalls a visit from his father in 1953. It is Christmas day, and the old tinker appears just as George and his wife and two daughters, Betsy and Claire (both at his deathbed now), are sitting down to eat. In George's fragmenting mind, his father enters the room quietly, sits on the couch with his hat in his lap, and inquires about the family, whom he has not seen in some time. His last words become the last words of his son as well: "I am a strange old man, yes. Well, no, I'd better be going. It was good to see you again George. Yes, yes, I will. Goodbye." For all its quasi-modernist pyrotechnics, this is quite a simple story. Things that are difficult owe their complication to the hallucinatory quality of George's compromised consciousness. Again, Faulkner comes to mind, as in the passages where George recalls his father's encounters in the Maine woods with the Indians who still linger at the edge of this vanishing wilderness. There is one Indian called Old Sabbatis, for instance, who comes to repair his father's wooden canoe every year. Here, as elsewhere, the writing can lift to lovely intensities: "He [Old Sabbatis] seemed to me as old as light and just as diffuse. I thought about him when the sky filled with files of dark clouds, whose silhouettes were traced by the sun and which were interspersed with the clearest and cleanest blue imaginable. When gold and red and brown leaves blow across paths and are taken up by circles of wind, it seems like the passing of his time." The author's tenses shift from past to present, reminding us that we are in an old man's scrambled thoughts. The world of the tinker's family is a 19th-century world of impoverished folks who scrape a living from the surrounding countryside and its ragged population. Harding never tires of painting the scene with prose that, here and there, edges toward the poetic with a little too much muscle, reaching for metaphors that don't quite work: "The sun was going down. It sank into the stand of beech trees beyond the back lot, lighting their tops, so that their bare arterial branches turned to a netting of black vessels around brains made of light." The occasional overwriting, the looping narrative, and the almost defiant lack of plot made this a hard book to sell to publishers. An array of editors at major houses rejected the novel, no doubt afraid it would never sell. It apparently sat for several years in the writer's desk. Then an obscure house, the Bellevue Literary Press, published it to such little fanfare that the New York Times (like most papers) ignored it completely. Then, miracle of miracles, it won the Pulitzer. It remains to be seen where Paul Harding, surely a gifted writer, will go from here. But Tinkers is worth any reader's time. It's an astringent meditation on loss, family ties, and the presence of the past, which - as Faulkner once suggested - is never dead. It's never really past. Jay Parini's novel The Passages of H.M. will be published in February by Canongate. To order Tinkers for pounds 9 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - Jay Parini One of these is Nikki Bocheki, "an old acquaintance from the Unitarian church". Like everyone in this novel, she is succinctly drawn: "Nikki was an old woman who dressed like an ageing former starlet whose most dramatic, and final, role was that of the ageing former starlet persevering under the tyranny of time. She was, in fact, a nurse. Once she had chatted with [George Washington] (who never remembered who she was) and his wife, she shooed the exhausted family from the room. I have three hours before my shift and I can't think of a nicer way to spend it than taking care of this sweet pie." There is one Indian called Old Sabbatis, for instance, who comes to repair his father's wooden canoe every year. Here, as elsewhere, the writing can lift to lovely intensities: "He [Old Sabbatis] seemed to me as old as light and just as diffuse. I thought about him when the sky filled with files of dark clouds, whose silhouettes were traced by the sun and which were interspersed with the clearest and cleanest blue imaginable. When gold and red and brown leaves blow across paths and are taken up by circles of wind, it seems like the passing of his time." The author's tenses shift from past to present, reminding us that we are in an old man's scrambled thoughts. - Jay Parini.
Kirkus Review
Elderly New Englander on his deathbed finds his thoughts drifting back to the father who abandoned the family when he was 12. His organs failing and his mind wandering, retired antique-clock repairman George Washington Crosby prepares to leave this world surrounded by loving family in the house he built himself. In a parallel narrative, his father Howard, a traveling peddler, sells cleaning supplies and sundries to dirt-poor farm wives in 1920s Massachusetts. Barely eking out enough to support his increasingly bitter wife Kathleen and four children, Howard has the heart of a poet and prefers nature walks to selling soap. His quiet desperation is complicated by regular epileptic seizures that leave him bloody and dazed, sometimes miles from home. A violent fit in his home results in him badly biting young George, prompting Kathleen to take steps to send her husband to a state-run mental hospital. He flees, leaving George to grow up into a meticulous, practical man who stashes cash in safety-deposit boxes, most likely as a reaction to his own penniless youth. Debut author Harding (Creative Writing/Harvard Univ.) employs diary entries, stream-of-consciousness musings and excerpts from clock-repair manuals to tell both men's stories. Short on dialogue and filled with lovely Whitmanesque descriptions of the natural world, this slim novel gives shape to the extraordinary variety in the thoughts of otherwise ordinary men. An evocative meditation on the nonlinear nature of a life. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* A tinker is a mender, and in Harding's spellbinding debut, he imagines the old, mendable horse-and-carriage world. The objects of the past were more readily repaired than our electronics, but the living world was a mystery, as it still is, as it always will be. And so in this rhapsodic novel of impending death, Harding considers humankind's contrary desires to conquer the imps of disorder and to be one with life, fully meshed within the great glimmering web. In the present, George lies on his death bed in the Massachusetts house he built himself, surrounded by family and the antique clocks he restores. George loves the precision of fine timepieces, but now he is at the mercy of chaotic forces and seems to be channeling his late father, Howard, a tinker and a mystic whose epileptic seizures strike like lightning. Howard, in turn, remembers his strange and gentle minister father. Each man is extraordinarily porous to nature and prone to becoming unhitched from everyday human existence and entering a state of ecstasy, even transcendence. Writing with breathtaking lyricism and tenderness, Harding has created a rare and beautiful novel of spiritual inheritance and acute psychological and metaphysical suspense.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
Library Journal Review
George Washington Crosby has eight days to live. After this first line, the life of George and of his father, Howard, who left when George was 12, is explored through the metaphor of George's hobby of repairing clocks. Howard was a peddler, traveling with a cart and mule through eastern Maine around the turn of the century. This isolated profession allowed him to keep his affliction, epilepsy, successfully hidden from most everyone until, finally, his wife decides he has to be institutionalized for the safety of her children. It is to avoid this that Howard disappears. George, as he lays dying, considers his life and family coming in and out of reality and history. Harding, an MFA from Iowa Writer's Workshop, creates a beautifully written study of father-son relationships and the nature of time. This short work is a solid addition for larger literary collections. Recommended.--Josh Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. Syst., Poughkeepsie, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.