Sunday Morning! “Tinkers” by Paul Harding

So, I wrote a novel.

I didn’t even mean to do it really. I just had a character in my head who was so vivid I felt like I could be a medium for her experiences and I tried to jot it all down as a short story. When that didn’t work, I accepted it would probably be a novella; there were three characters by this point and each needed some room to breathe. I wrote bits and pieces each day before I went to work back in Hamilton. Once I moved to New York, I found myself with enough time to finish the story (for the most part) sitting in Tompkins Square Park, sipping coffee, scribbling down words in notebooks. It’s about 88,000 words now and it’s done; alas, definitely a novel.

And now, it seems to be in a sort of purgatorial place; I think the story works and I have asked friends to read it and let me know if I’m right about that. It might fall apart in the middle, or run out of steam in the last section, or make no sense at all. Or, it might not. Really, there’s something embarrassing and needy about asking friends to give it another set of eyes. And then, how do you goad them to actually finish the thing? Who has time to read a work-in-progress and make notes? I should probably seek out “beta readers” and pay them. Or shelve the novel altogether.

My friend Darrell Epp has been supportive about what he’s read, while giving me memorable bits of advice like: “Always strive to be worthy of the guild you have joined, you never want to look at your work, and squint and say, ‘ehhh, close enough!’ be tough on yourself, in the sense that, sure -I- like your book, so what, what would gogol or grahame greene think of it.” Hoo, boy! What would Gogol think if he read it? Now, I’m gonna hide in bed for a month!

Darrell recommended I read Tinkers, a book written by a guy not too much older than either of us, which nearly wound up in the purgatorial zone. Released to very little fanfare on a small independent press by a first-time writer, Paul Harding, who had previously toured with his band Cold Water Flat and took some time off to pursue writing, the book first caught the attention of small bookstore owners, who praised its prose style and the clarity of its vision. With a small initial run, word of mouth spread far enough that it won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the first independent press book to do so in nearly thirty years.

Hoo, boy! This is what I need to read?!

Well, alright. And so, I started:

“George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died.”

George is dying at home, a home he built in a Massachusetts town where he worked as a high school councilor and fixed clocks in his spare time. His father, a traveling salesman named Harold, “drove a wagon for his living,” led by a mule named Prince Charles, selling goods to isolated cabins and farmhouses. In the course of his work, Harold also gave a boy a haircut for his wedding, pulled a hermit’s rotten tooth, and fished a dead child from a stream. Like father, like son: both men found purpose in their lives immersed in making and doing. The novel strongly evokes the New England trait of building everything you own, or at least fixing it when needed. Interestingly, George seems to have forgotten much of his own employment and remembered only the work. He remembers his father as a man who did the work. Our relationship with the world, the book seems to say, is rooted in care for others and things.

So, George is taking stock of his relationship with the world as it nears its end.

George Crosby remembered many things as he died, but in an order he could not control. To look at his life, to take the stock he always imagined a man would at his end, was to witness a shifting mass, the tiles of a mosaic spinning, swirling, reportraying, always in recognizable swaths of color, familiar elements, molecular units, intimate currents, but also independent now of his will, showing him a different self every time he tried to make an assessment.

As time slips away, everything for him is vibrant and alive. The structure of the novel is appropriately impressionistic and slightly disjointed. The writing is often vivid and striking. We’re there with George and his lost father, Harold, as they find solace in nature, home, and even the most painful, confusing memories. We gradually come to realize that George is trying to work out why his father left the family when he was just a boy. A man who has spent his life fixing clocks is now running out of time.

To some extent, every novel deals with time and memory. Even the hackiest pulp writing arranges events in time and takes a stand on which events are the most significant in a character’s life. My own novel is about a woman trying to make her own path in life, the dead mother who seems to haunt her efforts, and the wealthy man who saved her mother’s memory from oblivion when the woman would have rather he did not. It’s about whether remembering is a sacred obligation or a burden.

I’ve reached the point in life where there’s likely more of behind than ahead. By the time your life has reached any sort of fullness, you’ll have collected a lot of ordinary memories and spend a great deal of time cataloguing them. Most, I would imagine, will be about the people you’ve loved.  James Joyce said that novels should be about ordinary people and events, while extraordinary events were more the stuff of journalism. Literary novels tend to focus as well on the relationships between a few characters.

Tinkers is at heart about George’s memories of his parents’ estranged relationship. His father suffered from epilepsy, almost biting off George’s thumb as the family subdued him during a fit. His mother sought to have the father committed to an asylum, but he left the family before this could happen. The events have stuck with George his whole life and now he is reliving them one last time. It is all very ordinary, tragic but ordinary. Yet the characters’ brief and fleeting feelings of connection, with God, loved ones, things, and the natural world, imbue their story with a sense that all of human history is here in a son’s dying memories of his father.

Writing is a way of paying attention. It’s not that literature helps us find wonder in ordinary things; human beings can’t help but do that as it is. But art helps us to express and explore that wonder, which is something ordinary life hardly gives us any time to do. Somehow, moments are eternal and life is still too short.

I’d better get working on a second draft.

So, what are YOU reading, watching, pondering, playing, remembering, or hashing out this weekend?