Tinkers

It's difficult to say what's more compelling--the exceptionally rich use of language throughout debut novelist Paul Harding's Tinkers or the story of how it became the exception to conventional publishing wisdom when it won the Pulitzer Prize after a slew of publisher rejections and a measly $1,000 "symbolic" book advance from Bellevue Literary Press. So obscure the New York Times never even reviewed it (much to the paper's chagrin), Tinkers is a multi-generational drama told through multiple narrative points of view. We see the world through the dying eyes of New England tinker George Crosby, as well as those of his dead epileptic father, Howard. How we as readers could possibly have access to the consciousness of a dead man is not a concern of Harding. Rather the focus is on intricate, filigreed sentences constructed as carefully as the machinations of any clock. Periodically these lengthy descriptive sentences border on fussy, impeding narrative momentum. However, patient readers will be rewarded with singular linguistic configurations ("a constellation of such nests") marred only slightly by antiquated, stilted dialogue. Tinkers won't satisfy the plot-hungry, and it won't provide much in the way of comedic levity. What it offers instead is a serious view of how George remembers his life and that of his father as it draws to a close, furnished with the lyricism and infinitesimal grace we hope may be perceived at the end of a life well lived.