Tinkers by Paul Harding

Review by Michele Filgate
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Tinkers, Paul Harding. Bellevue Literary Press. 192pp, $14.95.

Paul Harding’s Tinkers meticulously examines life and death, its precision often mirroring that of the protagonist as he performs his vocation of repairing clocks. The novel, although slim, packs much detail into its tightly wound prose: three generations of a hard-scrabbled New England family are shared over 191 pages, centered around George Washington Crosby as he lies on his deathbed. Harding’s work has the same large scope of a family saga, but he brings to it a scientist’s eye for detail, pinpointing the intricate wheels that keep memories turning in people’s minds.

George’s job as a clock repairman is telling, for what is a clock but an embodiment of life in its allotted minutes and seconds? It’s beneath the face of the clock that more subtle things are going on, and it’s only as George spins between life and death that he’s able to see so clearly the meaning of the moments of his own life that have ticked by. Harding’s examination is far from tedious; under his careful guidance a whole world opens up, filled with vibrancy and meaning.

Harding’s clarity is often poetic and at times explosive, especially when describing George’s father, Howard, who traveled and sold goods (and fixed items, hence the title of the book) and who also suffered epileptic seizures:

Tinker, tinker. Tin, tin, tin. Tintinnabulation. There was the ring of pots and buckets. There was also the ring in Howard Crosby’s ears, a ring that began at a distance and came closer, until it sat in his ears, then burrowed into them. His head thrummed as if it were a clapper in a bell. Cold hopped onto the tips of his toes and rode on the ripples of the ringing throughout his body until his teeth clattered and his knees faltered and he had to hug himself to keep from unraveling. This was his aura, a cold halo of chemical electricity that encircled him immediately before he was struck by a full seizure.

Tinkers’ prose sings of seizure and shock, of frigidness and frozen motion. A grave condition is transformed into a poetic burst of alliteration and examination, but also remains terrifying. (Harding asks: “What is it like to be full of lightning? What is it like to be split open from the inside by lightning?”) The novel is full of these brief, intense moments of illumination and introspection; they both highlight the terror and awe of life and remind us of the pervasive ticking down of a person’s time.

Throughout Tinkers the narration alternates between George, Howard, and Howard’s father; each has his own distinct experiences. It starts when “George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died,” and it’s no secret that George will no longer be there by the end of the book. As George lays dying surrounded by family and friends, Harding weaves in and out of his consciousness to tell the story of George’s epileptic father, Howard, and briefly about Howard’s own father.

The last was a parishioner whose mental facilities gradually fade into telling his congregation that the devil might not be that bad. We are informed that Howard had never seriously entertained the idea of telling his son about his father, and it might be this distance between the three generations that leads to George’s strange sense of physical self:

Hands, teeth, gut, thoughts even, were all simply more or less convenient to human circumstance, and as my father was receding from human circumstance, so, too, were all of these particulars, back to some unknowable froth where they might be reassigned to be stars or belt buckles, lunar dust or railroad spikes. Perhaps they already were all of these things and my father’s fading was because he realized this.

There’s a rhythm to the memories people are left with, and in Harding’s world they’re all part of some chaotic but rational order of things. George’s painstaking attention to clocks takes on added dimensions when Harding describes his father’s and grandfather’s disconnect from their physical selves, because in Tinkers the body is not what matters: it isn’t permanent. Rather, what remains is memory, although Harding’s emphasis on the mind over the body does raise questions about how long memory itself lingers (both in a person and his descendants), even as his narrative delves into the ways in which it can be passed down the lines.

At one point in this luminous novel, George tries to make a recording of his own voice recounting his story. As he listens to his bland recounting of the cold, hard facts of his life, the words sound stilted, and he burns the tape because he’s embarrassed by the crudeness and unworthiness of the recording. This moment drives home the fact that, although George is surrounded by family at his bedside as he slowly deteriorates, it’s uncertain how, or even if, his memories of his father will be given to those who survive him.

I will remain a set of impressions porous and open to combination with all of the other vitreous squares floating about in whoever else’s frames, because there is always the space left in reserve for the rest of their own time, and to my great-grandchildren, with more space than tiles, I will be no more than the smoky arrangement of a set of rumors, and to their great-grandchildren I will be no more than a tint of some obscure color, and to their great grandchildren nothing they ever know about, and so what army of strangers and ghosts has shaped and colored me until back to Adam, until back to when ribs were blown from molten sand into the glass bits that took up the light of this word because they were made of this world . . .

George’s meditations make this a book that is not about death but instead an investigation into what life is all about. It’s not the plot that makes the novel work so much as the sentences, which each ring out like a grandfather clock bell reverberating through an empty house. Harding uses words to define the chaotic condensed time humans are allotted. There’s an unusual depth to the examination, and George’s last thoughts seem wise and hard-earned, undiminished by the fact that he is on the teetering edge of life and death. The precipice is what Harding is so concentrated on, as though he were holding a magnifying glass up under bright sunlight and setting fire to the page.

Michele Filgate is the Events Coordinator at RiverRun Bookstore and also a freelance writer. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in CBSNews.com, The Brooklyn Rail, Bookslut and PopMatters. She is a book reviews editor at Identity Theory and runs a blog.

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