Tinkers ~ Reviewed by Brenda Brooks
Book Reviews Friday, June 10th, 2011
Tinkers by Paul Harding
Windmill, 2011. 192 pages.
Reviewed by Brenda Brooks
Tinkers opens with George Washington Crosby hallucinating in a rented hospital bed in the living room of the house he built with his own hands decades before. His wife, children and grandchildren keep vigil, coming and going over a period of eight days until Crosby finally dies of sepsis from kidney failure, his heart winding down like one of the many intricate clocks he repaired and restored throughout the latter part of his life.
It is no coincidence that eight days is the average time required for an actual clock to run down, and though the metaphor (put so baldly) may seem obvious, Harding’s rendering of his character’s demise remains vital and striking throughout the novel’s 207 pages. George Crosby’s final days are measured out in feverish visions as he imagines his house crumbling around him, and revisits memories of the people and places he has loved. Central to these deliriums are memories of his impoverished New England boyhood and his epileptic father, a peddler, who abandoned the family for reasons both tragic and moving.
For some novels, plot is the main event and the central mandate of its language is to serve it. Tinkers might be considered a more “poetic” type of work, where style is emphasized over story-line, but Harding has written a work where language and theme are as inseparable as life is from death. He writes of that moment when we must cease to be, elevating it from the dark and bleak, into the human and beautiful.
Open the book anywhere and begin reading; it is life that maintains its dominion. Surely it is one of arts’ great gifts that, while evoking the undeniable reality of our own frailty and impermanence, we emerge somehow consoled.
Tinkers is Paul Harding’s first novel, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He once played drums in a band called Cold Water Flat.
Brenda Brooks is the author of Gotta Find Me An Angel, and two collections of poetry.
Other Reviews by Brenda Brooks
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Insightful review. I will buy this book based on Ms. Brooks review. It is outside of what are my normal “reads”…