Readers' Review: "Tinkers" By Paul Harding
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-06-27/readers-review-tinkers-paul-harding
Image courtesy of Bellevue Literary Press. All rights reserved.
George Washington Crosby, the central character in Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Tinkers,” is dying. As his family comes in and out of the living room where a hospital bed is set up, Crosby drifts in and out of disjointed memories. He recalls his hardscrabble childhood in rural Maine and his traveling salesman father who suffered from epilepsy. One reviewer calls the language in this book "dazzling." Another says it’s a novel that manages to put us in touch with the brilliant, elusive world of the senses. For this month's Readers' Review, we discuss “Tinkers” by Paul Harding.
Guests
Lisa Page
president, PEN/Faulkner Foundation
Neely Tucker
staff writer for The Washington Post magazine; author, "Love in the Driest Season," a memoir of adopting a baby in Zimbabwe.
Mark Athitakis
writer, editor, critic and blogger.
Related Items
Read An Excerpt
Excerpt from "Tinkers" by Paul Harding. Copyright 2009 by Paul Harding. Reprinted here by permission of Bellevue Literary Press. All rights reserved.
Comments
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Jim 32 years old.
Being raised in the suburbs within the stranger-danger no-social fabric society - I find that many people from my generation (mellienials) have rediscovered social fabric in college and is actively choosing to live in urban centers with active social fabrics. This one choice will have multiple secondary impacts.
When I read the book, I thought the wife left the brochure out so that he would leave home instead of being put into an institution. It puts her in a bit better light.
Glen
University Park, Maryland
I loved this book so much that I immediately reread it after the first time through, then went back to it a third time a few months later. The writing is so beautiful.
I have not had the opportunity to read the book, but it sounds to me that in kathelene's action of leaving the Brochure out for her husband to see; she was actually giving him a silent choice. She was letting him know what her action was going to be but was giving him a way out of sorts.
What a joy to listen to an entire show devoted to discussing a single novel. Please consider devoting a show to the three books that were finalists for this year's Pulitzer Prize. (IMHO, 'Swamplandia' alone is worth an hour!).
Harding's marvelous prose prove his mastery as a stylist of the highest order.
Tinkers is a brilliant first novel. The author has a poet's gift for figurative language as he evokes images of "splitting frozen wood so brittle it rang when you split it." Harding describes "the heartbreak of a cold sun and the wind "like the murmur of old men murmuring."
Read this book. It's well worth the effort!
My bookgroup read this book before it won the Pulitzer (author's aunt is in club.) I was confused during much of the book. People either loved or hated this book. I thought the author was obviously talented but I wish the story would have been more transparent. It reminded me a bit of Lord of Misrule, another prize winning novel. Beautifully written but difficult and lots of times I didn't know what was actually happening until many pages later. I could also tell that Marilynne Robinson was an influence, for sure. Not my favorite type of prose to read. I will be interested to check out his second try which I think he is working on now.