Tinkers [Paperback]

Paul Harding (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2009

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.

Pulitzer Prize, American Library Association Notable Book, PEN / Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers Award

“In Paul Harding’s stunning first novel, we find what readers, writers and reviewers live for.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“There are few perfect debut American novels. Walter Percy’s The Moviegoer and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird come to mind. So does Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. To this list ought to be added Paul Harding’s devastating first book, Tinkers. . . . Harding has written a masterpiece.” —John Freeman, National Public Radio

“Tinkers is truly remarkable. It achieves and sustains a unique fusion of language and perception. Its fine touch plays over the textured richnesses of very modest lives, evoking again and again a frisson of deep recognition, a sense of primal encounter with the brilliant, elusive world of the senses. It confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls.” —Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Home, Gilead, and Housekeeping

“[Tinkers is] a novel that you’ll want to savor. . . . I found reading it to be an incredibly moving experience.” —Nancy Pearl

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred 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.)
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From Booklist

*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. --Donna Seaman

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 191 pages
• Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press (January 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 193413712X
• ISBN-13: 978-1934137123
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.5 x 7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (286 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,639 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Paul Harding has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He lives in Georgetown, Massachusetts. He is the recipient of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for 'Tinkers.'

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

113 of 118 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Promising First Novel April 24, 2010

By Richard Pittman

Format:Paperback

Tinkers was a well reviewed first novel and I think it is a very promising debut. Its recent Pulitzer Prize win was shocking to many as it wasn't on the radar of most critics or pundits. I liked Tinkers but think that awarding it the Pulitzer was overdoing it a bit. It's certainly not even close to the worst novel to win the prize but again I think, for me, it's a level below the really good Pulitzer Prize winners.

The maddening thing about reading this novel is that it has the parts to be brilliant. The characters are vivid. Some of the story lines are inspired. I clearly felt the sadness of some of the characters and ultimately their desperation.

The basic story line is that George Washington Crosby is near death and looking back at his life. For the largest and by far best section of the novel, George is a young boy. He reminisces about life as a child but we also see this period from his father's point of view. His father, Howard, is the most compelling character in the novel and the one I had the most affection for.

Howard is a man of little means with the heart of a poet. He scrapes together a living by travelling around the rural backroads with his strange wagon of diverse wares. Howard suffers from epilepsy and this is a burden both to himself and his family. His son George and wife Kathleen both bear him some ill will for his affliction. The readers feel Howard's sadness and desperation.

George grows up to be a fairly normal man who has a family and later in life makes a lot of money fixing old clocks. He has a passion for tinkering with clocks and with hoarding the money he makes from this endeavour.

As mentioned, I think several of the storylines are brilliant.

For me, the book has two major flaws which wrongly or rightly, I'll attribute to it being a first novel. The style is quite overdone. His descriptions are long and though quite poetic, description occupies far too much space in the book. These parts feel like the writings of a college student. Lots of similes, metaphors and meditations. This is meant to augment the story and I believe it detracts.

The second flaw is that the stories are incomplete. This usually doesn't trouble me as I don't mind loose ends. In this case, there was a lot more elaboration on the key characters and stories that could have been done. This is a very short book and I think the core could have sustained a longer and more fully realized novel.

I thought Tinkers was very promising and I definitely look forward to Harding's next work but I really thought it had flaws that you could classify as overexuberant.

I recommend Tinkers but with reservations.

312 of 350 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Excellent Pulitzer Winner April 19, 2010

By Mark Wilson

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

While the Booker committee has made a habit of laying eggs of late, the Pulitzer has selected an impressive collection of literary gems. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Edward Jones' The Known World, Junot Diaz's Oscar Wao and, now, Paul Harding's Tinkers represent what great literature is all about.

I was only 20 pages into this book when I felt the overwhelming presence of Marilynne Robinson. Lo and behold, upon reading a Wikipedia entry on the author I found that he studied with Robinson at the Iowa Writers Workshop. The similarities with Gilead are strong, but not obtrusively so. I would categorize Tinkers as a more experimentally daring Gilead, or perhaps a more transcendental Gilead. The narrative is more disjointed in keeping with the protagonist's hallucinatory final illness, so the experimental nature is not gratuitous. And while Gilead was chock full of good ol' conventional Sunday religion, Tinkers tends to be more mystical and perhaps a bit more melancholy.

So who should read this excellent novel? Here you will find no explosions, no cosmic battles, no schools of magic, nobody scurrying about to solve cryptic ciphers. The cast of characters is small but deep; there's no major whodunit here. This is a family saga as told through the final, disjointed memories of a family patriarch in Maine. Like Gilead, the novel consists of the reminiscences of an old man nearing the end of his life. The narrative is not linear; it changes tense, perspective and tone with few signposts for the reader. But if you like a literary challenge, if you like the previous Pulitzer winners and if you enjoy poetic use of the English language along the lines of Marilynne Robinson, you will enjoy this novel. It's a major achievement.

56 of 59 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Pulitzer Winning Novel Set in Maine April 17, 2010

By C. E. Selby

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Even here in Miami Beach in mid-April I found myself shuddering occasionally as I slowly moved through this remarkable small book, mine not yet identified as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Literature. A man is dying, his last hours ticking away in a hospital bed in the dining room of a house filled with clocks, for he has tinkered on them during his long life. He sees the world around him collapsing upon itself, the tiles of his life as meaningless, at least to future generations. And as he lies there, his kidneys almost functionless, he thinks about his father, an epileptic who was a door-to-door salesman in a fictional West Cove, Maine. The cover of this book is just so perfect: the life of the Crosby family is a bleak as is that part of the world in winter.
This may be a difficult book for some readers to get into because for a while one is provide with a richness of language that is not often found in current literature, as rich as the language of another novel set in Maine and also a Pulitzer winner, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. What is it about Maine that gets all these Pulitzer novels? Before that Richard Russo's Empire Falls.
Paul Harding's artistry allows readers into the minds of its characters. George's mother wishes she could kill herself, an impoverished woman with four children, an epileptic husband, and isolated in this tragic setting. But the lake is too frozen for her to chop the hole that would allow her to drown. The reader shivers as he reads what she is thinking. And this is only one small piece of the mastery of Harding's language. And as I read this novel I thought about my maternal grandparents who lived atop a small mountain in northern Vermont living without electricity until their fiftieth wedding anniversary in the early fifties. My grandmother was as hard on her children as George's mother was on him and his siblings. But Harding helps one to get into the skin of women like that. This is incredible prose.
There is just something about Maine apparently. We should all be watching new novels coming out of there.