Who needs Mars?

Tinkers
Paul Harding
2009, Bellevue Literary Press


Every year, I wait in anticipation for the announcement of the Pulitzer Prize and do my damnedest to request the fiction finalists before the library system gets bombarded with requests. This year, my class prevented me from having access to a computer until very late in the afternoon. I figured to myself, Who really is going to request these books before you? and was content to wait until several hours after the announcement.

In the past, I was happy to discover that the need to request was null, for I had already read the book awarded the fiction prize - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, for example, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

While the book was available for request, I was rather surprised to find that afternoon that the Pulitzer website had crashed from an excess of traffic. To further my surprise, I discovered after ten minutes of refreshing the page that this year's winning novel was a work I'd never heard of: Tinkers by an author I'd never heard of, Paul Harding.

Paul Harding, as it turns out, is one of the finest writers I've had the privilege to read in my life. His novel Tinkers takes place on the North Shore of Massachusetts, which coincidentally, is where I live.

Tinkers is about death. The main characters are George, a man reminiscing about his life from his deathbed, and Howard, George's father whose own mortal troubles are recounted not so much in flashback as simultaneously in a time-warping feat of narrative. One man's consciousness bleeds into the other. George's death illuminates his father's life, Howard's life lends gravity to his son's.

But while Tinkers is primarily about death, it is so much more about life - about what the experience of consciousness is, about how to (re-)discover the world around you, about ways of perceiving the physical world, about how to cope with the emotional world, about how the intertwining of our lives necessitates man's need for spirituality.

Most excitingly, though, it's about how good writing can reinvent the world, reinvigorate the soul. Rather than continue writing about the novel, I will instead include a lengthy excerpt from the book (which at a mere 191 pocket-sized pages leaves you no excuse not to read this book). I will warn in advance the the book does indeed contain a narrative (of sorts) and that the sample below is representative of the author's jaw-dropping wordsmithing and is not representative of the way the entire novel reads.

This is a book. It is a book I found in a box. I found the box in the attic. The box was in the attic, under the eaves. The attic was hot and still. The air was stale with dust. The dust was made up of the book I found. I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it. The book has a red marbled cover. It has large pages. The pages are made of heavy paper the color of blanched almonds. The book is filled with writing. The writing is in blue ink. The ink is heavy and built up in places the way paint builds up on canvas. The paper did not absorb the ink. The ink had to dry before the book was closed or a page turned. The blue of the ink is so dark that it looks black. It is only in flourishes tailing off of serifs or in lines where the hand lessened its pressure on the pen that you can see the blue. The handwriting looks like yours. It looks like you wrote the book. It is a dictionary or an encyclopedia of some sort. The book is full of reports from the backs of events, full of weak, cold light from the north, small constructions from short summers. Let me read you an example...

Cosmos Borealis:
Light skin of sky and cloud and mountain on the still pond. Water body beneath teeming with reeds and silt and trout (sealed in day skin and night skin and ice lids), which we draw out with silk threads, fitted with snags of fur or bright feathers. Skin like glass like liquid like skin; our words scrieved the slick surface (reflecting risen moon, spinning stars, flitting bats), so that we had only to whisper across the wide plate. Green drakes blossomed powder dry among the stars, glowing white, out of pods, which rose from the muck at the bottom of the pond and broken open on the skin of the water. We whispered across the galaxies, Who needs Mars?

Such prose moves me to tears. "Skin like glass like liquid like skin." I mean... shit.

Like his protagonists, Paul Harding is a tinker. He twists and pulls the mechanics of being, manipulating syntax and perception, and re-examines the world through his heart-stopping prose. Harding is nothing short of a visionary.

I hope that this excerpt, if not my somewhat dumbfounded recommendation, spurs you to read this book. You won't regret it.