Tinkers by Paul Harding – #NovNov Day 13

Another late post today, because I was out this evening – seeing the film Early Summer – but today I read 2009’s Tinkers by Paul Harding, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. I bought it in 2012, possibly because of the enthusiastic quote from Marilynne Robinson on the back. The novel opens:

George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died.

Great opening line, isn’t it? From here, we occasionally go back to the hospital bed and the disorienting world of the present – but George is much more at home in the past, by now. And not only his past. As he lies there, memory and invention swirl together as the narrative takes us into his past and into his father’s. George is a watch-mender, and the story feels like taking apart a watch – tinkering with it, and finding out how every small part works.

His own upbringing was in poverty, with an unreliable mother and a father who abandoned the family one day. Before this, the father’s most unpredictable quality was his seizures. In an era before any medication to help these, they were both frequent and alarming – though George only witnessed one once.

One of the unusual things about Tinkers is how it wanders in and out of first and third person. It all seems to stem from George’s memory, but sometimes we are in the first person of Howard’s (his father) narrative, seeing things that George couldn’t possibly have witnessed.

He had spoken no words to himself. No conscious thought precipitated his action, as if spending the whole day contemplating what he was going to do, had already done by the time he fitted words to the actions, which was to ride past the kitchen window that framed his family and leafed them in its gold light, would have diluted his resolve, would have led him to turn himself over to a fate that, had he thought about it, he would have accepted rather than acknowledge its implications. He could not have let himself be witness to the simultaneity of his wife passing him a plate of chicken or a basket of hot bread as she worked out her plans to have him taken away. Howard had assumed that their silence over his fits, over everything, stood for his gratefulness to her and her loyalty to him. He had assumed their silence was one of kindness offered and accepted.

It works because of the almost dreamlike ventures into memory that are the premise of the novella. And I particularly enjoyed when another piece of the puzzle was added, and we see Howard’s relationship with his own father – an other-worldly minister, not realising when his mind starts to depart. I can see why Marilynne Robinson liked the novel; in its structure, it has elements of Gilead and the legacy that can be passed through generations of experience.

The only bits that didn’t work quite so well for me were where it goes too stream of consciousness, and entire pages would be single paragraphs. And there was a collage-y feel at times, with quotes from other places – possibly fabricated, I’m not sure. Some on watchmaking worked well, but I had no idea what was going on with the sections on Borealis, which are sort of numbered entries of poetic experiences. Mystifying.

All in all, another Novellas in November success. I think Harding’s writing suffers a little in comparison to Robinson’s in a similar line, but it’s hardly a far comparison as Robinson is superlatively good at this. I still really liked Tinkers a lot, and would happily re-read it.