Currently Reading

Reading: My Two Polish Grandfathers, by Witold Rybczynski.
Listening to: Blasphemy, by Douglas Preston.

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Mary Reviews: Tinkers


Tinkers, by Paul Harding. (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2009)

Paul Harding is an extraordinary stylist. His prose reads like poetry, bringing sensitive and illuminating description to both natural and supernatural settings. The reader savors the words and then longs to read them aloud, just to hear how perfectly they fit together.

This is a tiny book, just under 200 pages. In it, the author tells two stories, of a father and a son, Howard and George, focusing on their early lives, before Howard leaves his family behind to begin a new life.

George, the younger of the two characters, is on his deathbed and surrounded by his extended, attentive family, experiencing fantastic hallucinations. We learn of the early life of his father, Howard, reading how, as a young man, he traveled with mule and cart, suffered epileptic seizures, and ultimately, left his family out of fear of being committed to a mental institution.

Both men are tinkers. Howard is the kind of tinker who sells and repairs household goods from his cart, while George tinkers with fixing his house and repairing clocks. Their relationships with their families couldn't be more different, though. George keeps his family close, as we can see by the number of people keeping vigil as his life comes to an end, while Howard abandons his wife and children, even his name, to begin a new life in a new city.

I loved reading this book for the beauty of the prose. I was less enchanted by the story. What do I know? It received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year.