Paul Harding's Tinkers popped of the shelf with its prestigious fanfare - 'Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction' and 'Campus Best seller' at Harvard. Needless to say I was pretty excited when I picked up a copy on a recent business trip to Boston. I'm always trying to find something 'authentic' when I'm out and about and it usually works out well for example the paper-back copy of Philip Roth's Indignation I bought at Newark airport and Murakami's Kafka on the Beach found in a bookshop in Shinjuku.
Tinkers is the story an old man, George, who lays on his death bed in New England with his family close by. George is, amongst other things, a repairer of old clocks; a discipline which leaves him reflecting on his life with the methodical precision of an antique timepiece.
Little actually happens in Tinkers, this is an existential story made up of flash-backs and reminisces of a life lived and one about to be lost. Plot is thin as the narrative is largely made up of short and disjointed memories meant to capture a dying man's final hallucinatory hours.
George reflects not just on this life but that of his father, Howard, one of the 'Tinkers' alluded to in the novel. At times the novel is beautiful and reminiscent of other short-form literary fiction such as Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending.
"I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it"
But at other times the prose gets tangled in its own metaphor;
"When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart"
There are sections I really enjoyed but others that left me wanting to skim read. Tinkers is a draft of something far more heartfelt but not yet fully realised in this format. The novels setting might play out a pastoral east coast US romance made for the New England psyche but I was left feeling cold and unmoved. The plus side is that its only 176 pages long.
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