Tinkers Explores the Predominance of Family in Ourselves

It's not often that a novel gets into one's dreams. When one does, it's usually due to some super gory, explicit detail covering Hannibal Lecter's latest kill, or the misery of a post-apocalyptic world where people must eat babies to survive.

Tinkers, Paul Harding's 2009 Putlizer Prize winning novel, is neither gory, nor apocalyptic. However, it is about death. "George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died," the novel opens. The next 190 pages of this taut story chronicles Crosby's flashbacks of his childhood, of his clock fixing tinkering, and especially of his father. Tinkers pervaded my dreams, not because of any scary content, but because of its beautiful descriptions of Crosby's flashbacks. He hallucinates that the walls are caving in around him, that the ceiling is falling in. Finally, the sky and the stars also collapse on top of him. Harding evokes all this with an incredible control of language, conveying the sense that he's actually seen what this looks like first hand:

"The very blue of the sky followed, draining from the heights into that cluttered concrete socket. Next fell the stars, tinkling about him like the ornaments of heaven shaken loose. Finally, the black vastation itself came untacked and draped over the entire heap, covering George's confused obliteration."

Harding's gorgeous sentences keeps the image in one's mind and haunts one's dreams.

Intertwined with George Crosby's thinkings is the story of his father, Howard Crosby, as a salesman in the 1920's. We learn that Howard is an epileptic. Harding's descriptions of Howard's do-it-yourselfness (he pulls a homeless man's tooth) during his travels and his epileptic episodes parallels George Crosby's tinkering and death-bed hallucinations. Readers wonder just how similar sons are to their fathers, whether or not by choice.

Indeed, much of Tinkers' power lies in what it omits. The only suspense comes from wondering if anything strange will happen to George Crosby on his death-bed. Though a new plot line creeps up three quarters into the book when we find out why Howard Crosby leaves his family when George is ten, the compression of the next seventy years into the last forty pages is much more profound than the actual details of the events.

Harding shows simply how quickly a lifetime goes by. As George dies, "He remembered all of the time that stood between himself as a boy of twelve and himself as a middle-aged husband and father contracting to zero." Harding encapsulates an entire life without showing us who George is as a husband, as a father, or as a grandfather. It's up to us to fill in the gaps based on the structure that Harding has provided us; based only on George's interactions as a boy with Howard, and George's propensities for clock-fixing in old age. By only providing these limited details, Harding proposes that maybe one's roots are all that matters.