Tinkers (2009) is the first novel by American author, Paul Harding. The novel tells the stories of George Washington Crosby, an elderly clock repairman, and of his father, Howard. On his deathbed, George remembers his father, who was a tinker selling household goods from a donkey-drawn cart and who struggled with epilepsy. The novel was published by Bellevue Literary Press, a sister organization of the Bellevue Literary Review. Tinkers won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and other awards and honors. The Pulitzer board called the novel "a powerful celebration of life in which a New England father and son, through suffering and joy, transcend their imprisoning lives and offer new ways of perceiving the world and mortality."Tinkers follows George Crosby in the days before he dies and his memories from his childhood. The book takes you through both George's life as well as his father's, Howard, who sells home …
Tinkers (2009) is the first novel by American author, Paul Harding. The novel tells the stories of George Washington Crosby, an elderly clock repairman, and of his father, Howard. On his deathbed, George remembers his father, who was a tinker selling household goods from a donkey-drawn cart and who struggled with epilepsy. The novel was published by Bellevue Literary Press, a sister organization of the Bellevue Literary Review. Tinkers won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and other awards and honors. The Pulitzer board called the novel "a powerful celebration of life in which a New England father and son, through suffering and joy, transcend their imprisoning lives and offer new ways of perceiving the world and mortality."Tinkers follows George Crosby in the days before he dies and his memories from his childhood. The book takes you through both George's life as well as his father's, Howard, who sells home goods from a wagon in New England. You learn about George's skill at fixing clocks which becomes a metaphor for life's beauty as well as its fragility. It is about Howard's struggle with epilepsy as well as his own relationship with his father who was a minister who fell ill when Howard was a boy. It is a novel that is not only about death but the gift of simple pleasures of nature and being in the world. It is about fathers and sons, solitude and connection.
This book will alienate its share of readers by alternating between prose-driven and plot-driven style, not to mention going off on metaphysical tangents and having an infatuation with lists, but I appreciate that it at least tries to be different.
A brilliantly written short novel that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010, but I found it so dense that reading it was a slog. It reminded me of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.
Reading tinkers (the "t" is down) made me wonder why I'm not finding more books that I really love. While tinkers is good, deep, written by an author who calls himself a modern-day New England transcendentalist, it made me think of when I read Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists, also published in 2010, and how bummed I got when I saw that I had just fifty or so pages of it left to read.
Why aren't I finding more books like that?
Beautifully written little book, but there wasn't much to it. I'm surprised that it won such an enormous prize.
The general consensus was that this was an interesting book. Memorable, and difficult. Some people liked the book, but grudgingly, only after thinking about it for awhile. And some were still thinking.
Great parts of it were pure poetry though. Jenna read from some articles, some about the Cinderella story of a first, and oft-rejected, novel winning the Pulitzer, and some from interviews. George is loosely based on Harding's own grandfather, whose own father had epilepsy and abandoned his family.
The story of three generations of men told as the youngest is dying and hallucinating about the past.
This is a terrifically written little book, with a meandering, sometimes confusing plot. The characters are wonderfully drawn and the descriptions are beautifully evocative. I loved this book, but I can see how it would not be to everyone's taste.
I've been reading a lot about Tinkers lately on the Internets, as it kind of came out of nowhere to win the Pulitzer Prize. While it's great that a small-press novel can both fly under the radar and be critically acclaimed, I wasn't all that impressed by the novel. It's wonderfully written, but not all that interesting or memorable. For a novel that uses death to reflect on life, I'd stick with Jim Crace's magnificent Being Dead
