Tinkers
by Paul Harding
Summary
George Washington Crosby is dying in a hospital bed in his living room, surrounded by his family, and the clocks he repaired for a living are all around him. Over the eight days before he dies his mind comes apart, and the novel follows it: the present dissolving into his childhood in rural Maine, and further back into the life of his father Howard, a travelling tinker who sold brushes and soap from a wagon and suffered from epilepsy.
The centre of the book is what Howard did. Facing committal to an institution after a seizure during which he bit his son, he left, without explanation, and the family never learned where he went. George spends his last days circling that absence.
There is almost no conventional plot. There are extended passages on horology, on the mechanics of a seizure described from the inside, and on New England woods in every season, and the prose is dense, lyrical and very slow. Harding breaks it up with quotations from an invented eighteenth century clock manual.
Howard's wife Kathleen is the hardest figure in the book. She is the one who arranged the committal, and the novel neither excuses her nor pretends she was wrong.
At under two hundred pages it is short, but it is not quick, and readers expecting narrative will be frustrated. Best read in one or two sittings, in quiet, in the way you would read a long poem. For readers who love Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, this is the nearest equivalent.
Historical Context & Significance
Tinkers won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it is the great outsider story of the prize's modern history.
Paul Harding could not sell it. The manuscript was turned down across the industry for years, on the grounds that a short, plotless, lyrical novel about a dying clock repairer had no market. It was eventually published by Bellevue Literary Press, a tiny nonprofit press attached to the NYU School of Medicine, in a first printing of around three and a half thousand copies, and it was sold largely by independent booksellers pressing it on customers by hand.
The Pulitzer citation called it "a powerful celebration of life in which a New England father and son, through suffering and joy, transcend their imprisoning lives and offer new ways of perceiving the world and mortality." It was the first book from a small press to win the fiction prize in three decades, and its sales ran into the tens of thousands within days of the award, and reached hundreds of thousands later.