Tinkers

Tinkers
by Paul Harding
read: 2012
Pulitzer Prize

Tinkers is a member of a particular tribe of novel that rubs me the wrong way.  The prose borders on free-verse poetry, trying to get me to really intensely experience every scene in a way some readers probably like but I find tiring.  Although it's quite a short novel, it's packed with imagery and metaphor and characters spouting philosophy to the point where it loses much of its meaning.  A little more humor would help, too (A welcome exception is a series of encounters between Howard and Gilbert, a hermit in the woods, who turns out to be a classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne's).  It's also got a lot of "the novel as craft" elements to it.  Get this: George, the main character, is a clock repairman, and so there are passages describing the working of clocks and the passage of time, but the narrative is told non-chronologically, with the plot spiraling out of itself backwards before ultimately regrouping in the conclusion.  It's like, a metaphor for the movement of a clock!  How clever!

There were a lot of things I liked about Tinkers, though.  A major theme is the way family history is passed between the generations and how they are connected to each other.  The novel has a few different story arcs, but a repeated pattern is the disconnect between father and son.  George Crosby is repulsed as a boy by his father Howard's Grand Mal seizure and tries to run away from home.  Later on we see Howard, as a boy, searching desperately through the woods looking for his own father, a former minister who's been taken away to an asylum for the insane.  The generations are cheated out of an opportunity to understand each other, father and son, as men.

Another element that worked for me was the element of "magic realism."  There are elements of unreality throughout the novel that are presented as fact and not really explained.  How could Gilbert the hermit really be old enough to be a classmate of Hawthorne's?  What did Howard really see in the woods when he saw the fish jump directly into the Indian's mouth?  This element of magic infuses other events, making it unclear whether descriptions are literal or metaphors.  When Howard describes his father fading away, it seems like it must be a metaphor, yet he describes the fading so visceral that it's ambiguous.  The reader is left guessing whether descriptions are poetic, reflective of derangement brought on by epilepsy or impending death, or magic.

I feel as if I've contradicted myself in the above paragraphs, but I really am ambiguous about Tinkers.  There are elements I liked about it, scenes or moments that spoke to me.  At the same time, parts of it felt high-falutin' and too precious.  There are undoubtedly readers who would absolutely love this book, and others who would hate it.  I fall somewhere in the middle.