Tinkers

Genre: fiction

Keywords: aging, autobiography, biography, dementia, epilepsy, father-son relationship, geriatrics, senility

Summary:

Tinkers, a debut novel by Paul Harding, is a slim book that garnered for him the unlikely plum of a Pulitzer Prize – unlikely given its first novel-hood and its torturous history of rejections by myopic agents and editors. Published by Bellevue Literary Press as an act of faith, it has become an object lesson to said agents and editors and to BLP and all those who write and publish on faith. (The story of its publication is readily available throughout the web and makes for interesting and at times inspirational reading.)  It is the transgenerational story of three generations of Crosby’s – the last two of them tinkers. The book opens with the iterative “x hours” OR “y days before George Crosby died” a formula that can be dangerously repetitive and cloying in the wrong hands but effective in the right ones, like Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude. A watch repair man, George reflects, as he lies dying, on his childhood with a tinker father, Howard, who was enslaved by familial and occupational circumstance and who barely escaped institutionalization by his unloving wife. The novel then travels even farther back in familial time visiting Howard’s memories of his preacher father who is ferried away one day, presumably to an institution which he may have merited, given the description of his deteriorating cognitive abilities in the book, unlike Howard, who merely had epilepsy and a firm grasp on the unreality of reality, an imagination he shares with his son, George. Like Julian Gloag’s Lost and Found, the narrator hops, skips and jumps around, between, among and amid these three generations of eccentric men, but the reader is never at a loss (at least for long) to discover the sense of a continuous story or feels the least chronologically displaced. And by novel’s end, it all makes organic sense. A lot of it.

Commentary:

This book is such a marvel it is daunting where to begin. Indeed, one could easily write an exegesis that surpasses the novel in page length, and that’s just the sections praising this novel. First is its fluid and poetic style. Harding does with sentences and words and phrases what magicians do – he creates wonders in front of you while you are watching him carefully, leaving you amazed, dumbfounded and grateful, and wanting more. Some of his sentences are downright Proustian in length but never cycle into confusion or tedious description –  no easy task for those who attempt such feats. And they work. His characters are full and fascinating. Descriptions of events, clocks, natural scenery and simple actions are elegaic.

Of interest to literature and medicine readers, this book is replete with descriptions of epilepsy (Howard is afflicted with it) and family reactions to it. (At the 2010 University of Iowa “The Examined Life Conference”, author Harding described to the audience his research in epilepsy before describing it – nothing. Yet, he said, he had received several letters from people with epilepsy confirming the clinically accurate descriptions of it in his novel. It reminded me of Arnold Bennett’s anecdote in the preface to his The Old Wives’s Tale, wherein he describes a similar experience with the narration of a judicial hanging.) The relationships of husband-wife and mother-son in a setting of illness are detailed and rewarding, although it has understandably received broadsides for the unpleasant depiction of women herein.  The contrast between Howard’s mother (George’s paternal grandmother) and George’s own mother is illuminating given similar circumstances. Since both men are dreamers and independent tinkers, one can almost believe in Lamarck and Lysenko that familial traits like independence, imagination and aloofness are vertically transmitted extra-genetically!

Also of interest to literature and medicine readers are the attitudes of loved ones to a cognitively unraveling older man. Since such passages are seamlessly incorporated into the whole, it is difficult to give small examples of what Harding describes as “fading”. (This concept is more complicated – much more complex – than simple dementia and can involve healthy characters as seen from the active imagination of the beholder in the story.) The comparisons of George’s reflections while dying will give readers of Banville’s The Infinities hours of useful comparison.

But perhaps more than any of its virtues, this book is already a classic for its highly unusual marriage of deep thoughts with a deceptively gossamer style. The good news is that this book is addicting and hard to put down. The bad news, you guessed it, is the same. It should have a label in front, like cigarette packages, This Book may be Hazardous to the Health of your Agenda.

Author: Paul Harding

Title of Work: Tinkers

Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press

Edition: 2009

Place published: NYC, NY

Miscellaneous:

Tony Miksanek published an earlier, far more articulate review for the NYU database (with a more complete list of tags, or keywords) but I did not do my homework first and wrote this without knowing that.

http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?action=view&annid=12925

Annotated by: Richard M. Ratzan

Date of post: October 29, 2011