I usually dislike it when a book is described by someone as being “difficult.” As long as we’re proficient in the language the book is written in, no book should be “difficult” for the careful and attentive reader. Or so I thought. Paul Harding’s surprise Pulitzer Prize winner, Tinkers, needs a little time and more than one reading to understand the depth of its many layers. Tinkers weighs in at fewer than 200 pages, yet its prose is so dense and detailed that by the time we’ve finished (often at a single sitting) we feel as though we’ve read a 1,000 page family saga.
Tinkers opens as George Washington Crosby, an eighty-year-old member of a long line of New Englanders, lies only eight days from death due to renal failure, “on a rented hospital bed, placed in the center of his living room.” As George, who recognizes that he’s surrounded by family and …show more content…
When George’s grandfather’s mental acuity began to fade, he began to tinker with lives, telling his parishioners that really, the devil might not be “all that bad” after all. George had been a clock repairman, and he was fascinated with the gears and tumblers that caused them to tick and chime, just as life ticks away – little by little – each day. It was George’s father, Howard, however, who was the true tinker, traveling the countryside of rural Maine in his wagon, drawn by his ancient mule, Prince Edward, selling pots and pans, needles and thread, buckets and thimbles. Howard can “shoot a rabid dog, deliver a baby, put out a fire, pull a rotten tooth, cut a man’s hair.” But just as George, near death, envisions his world breaking apart and hallucinates his house and the sky and the stars falling in on him, Howard’s world, too, breaks apart, not in death, but in grand mal epileptic seizures so frightening and terrible that after a particularly bad one that occurred on Christmas day, Howard’s wife, Katherine, makes the decision to commit him to a mental
Tinkers opens as George Washington Crosby, an eighty-year-old member of a long line of New Englanders, lies only eight days from death due to renal failure, “on a rented hospital bed, placed in the center of his living room.” As George, who recognizes that he’s surrounded by family and …show more content…
When George’s grandfather’s mental acuity began to fade, he began to tinker with lives, telling his parishioners that really, the devil might not be “all that bad” after all. George had been a clock repairman, and he was fascinated with the gears and tumblers that caused them to tick and chime, just as life ticks away – little by little – each day. It was George’s father, Howard, however, who was the true tinker, traveling the countryside of rural Maine in his wagon, drawn by his ancient mule, Prince Edward, selling pots and pans, needles and thread, buckets and thimbles. Howard can “shoot a rabid dog, deliver a baby, put out a fire, pull a rotten tooth, cut a man’s hair.” But just as George, near death, envisions his world breaking apart and hallucinates his house and the sky and the stars falling in on him, Howard’s world, too, breaks apart, not in death, but in grand mal epileptic seizures so frightening and terrible that after a particularly bad one that occurred on Christmas day, Howard’s wife, Katherine, makes the decision to commit him to a mental