Tinkers, by Paul Harding

Paul Harding’s Tinkers and its Nested Wonders

Readers of Tinkers, Paul Harding’s 2009 debut, are well advised to bring their wits to their reading. On his way to winning the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for fiction (in his debut!), Harding deploys two very splendid features: the beauty and descriptive vivacity of his prose, and his challenging leaps in narrative voice, tense and point of view. I’m offering multiple passages to illustrate both of these glowing virtues. The leaps I have mentioned occur frequently and without warning or explanation—on more than one occasion, in the middle of a sentence. These jumps force readers to shift and reset their attention, and keep them alive to possibility. This choppy flow mimics human consciousness itself, and gives the reader extremely close observations of the main character’s wandering mind. This intimacy is a challenge, one which readers will be very glad they accept.

These switches are frequent and unannounced, as it were, but the chief challenge to straightforward sequential narration is what Harding has done with time: he’s thrown narrative chronology into a blender—and this treatment is not simply a featuring of flashbacks. The author shunts his principal narrative to side tracks constantly and the storytelling that has taken over (of another time and place) will stretch to multiple pages. It’s impossible to tell whether or when we will return to the basic storyline. The only order guiding plot events is narrative need, as judged by the author.

Before addressing these remarkable features, let’s proceed to basics: the story treats the lives of Howard Aaron Crosby and George Washington Crosby, who are father and son, respectively, and who live in hardscrabble backwoods Maine in the early 20th Century. For some of the novel Howard travels around with his wagon, pulled by a mule named Prince Edward. In his calling as a tinker, he has fixed pots, delivered a baby, pulled a rotten tooth, cut a man’s hair, and pulled a drowned child from a creek. He is paid (sort of) to sell hardware, soap, string, pails, and other supplies to the barely-getting-by farming folk on his route. (I have seen Howard’s son George described in the literature as the protagonist of Tinkers, but the bulk of the text—the key ideas, the main emotional interest and focus of the plot, belongs to Howard, not George.)

Howard’s supervising sales agent regularly fleeces him. The simple backwoods folk suspect even the tiniest changes in Howard’s bill of fare, in addition to fiercely pinching their pennies. So Howard barely gets by. But among other things he fancies himself a poet, and his flights of language and imagination justify his view of himself. The following passage is a stunning, representative exhibit of Harding’s surpassingly beautiful prose. It relays what’s in Howard’s consciousness.

At page 53-54 (ISBN 9781934137, pbk, ©2009) the passage, which I have carefully cut and edited, its length notwithstanding. It describes Howard deeply enjoying a beautiful summer afternoon. He’s driving his wagon on his route, and falls into dreamlike speculation. (The italics are in the original.):

“The rutted road ran between two mild slopes. The trees that grew on the slopes leaned in toward the road so that their lowest branches brushed the grass. The sun lowered, and there was brightness in the treetops and brightness in the long grass, and in between a band of shadows gathered and held in the skirts of the lowest branches. Howard rode along the track and had the sense that once he passed, the shadows leaked out from beneath the edge of the forest, down the incline and out onto the dirt. Behind him also, along with the shadows, animals came to browse in the grass at the verge, and a black booted red fox darted across the bright road from darkness to darkness. … He resisted the desire to stop the wagon and give Prince Edward an apple and crawl into the shadows …[which would become]submerged in the flood tide of night, because the secrets gathered in the shadows at the tree line that rustled and waited until he passed, and which made the hair on his arms and the back of his neck stand on end and his scalp tighten when he felt them flooding, invisible, the road around him, were dispelled each time he turned his direct attention to them, scattered to just beyond his sight. The true essence, the secret recipe of the forest and the light and the dark was far too fine, and subtle to be observed with my blunt eye—water sack, and nerves, miracle itself, fine itself: light catcher. But the thing itself is not forest and light and dark, but something else scattered by my coarse gaze, by my dumb intention. The quilt of leaves and light and shadow and ruffling breezes might part and I’d be given a glimpse of what is on the other side; a stitch might work itself loose or be worked loose. The weaver might have made one bad loop in the foliage of a sugar maple by the road, and that one loop of whatever the thread might be wound from – light, gravity, dark from stars – had somehow been worked loose by the wind in its constant worrying of white buds and green leaves and blood-and-orange leaves and bare branches, and two of the pieces of whatever it is that this world is knit from had come loose from each other and there was maybe just a finger width’s hole which I was lucky enough to spot in the glittering leaves from this wagon of drawers and nimble enough to scale the silver trunk and brave enough to poke my finger into the tear that might offer to the simple touch a measure of tranquility or reassurance.

“Such were the qualities of Howard’s daydreams when Prince Edward pulled the cart with animal certainty along the canopied dirt tracks and he fell into a sort of waking stupor in which his mind was as it is when a person sleeps but his dreams are composed by his open eyes.”

Here we have a perfect example of the nested nature of Harding’s prose. I call it “nested” because these personal asides and poetic flights of fancy take place within a more general narration; they’re included to deepen the emotional or philosophical nuances or to play a part in Harding’s ingenious plotting.

As this passage demonstrates, Harding follows straightforward authorial narration with abrupt shifts into first person soliloquy, along with sudden changes in tense. For good measure, the author also sprinkles in Howard’s lengthy entries from his book of nature and stellar observations (the Borealis series), along with passages from something Harding calls The Reasonable Horologist, which he dates from 1783. The result is indeed a jumbled-up, delightfully challenging narrative.

Howard’s voice rules here. We have sampled his poetic, imaginative flights in which he considers the world and universe around him—he has a reasonably strong grip on the universe’s known features at the time. He complains bitterly to himself about his lot in life, and doubts the God which his father the preacher so fervently believed in. He luxuriates in the natural world, imagining a kaleidoscope in the trees, grass, and sky as he travels along of an afternoon. We find that in a passage cited later.

Harding fills in a few details of Howard’s early life two thirds of the way through the book. We are introduced at the beginning of Chapter 3 to odd and unsettling scenes that not only inform his later decisions and observations, but also contain a principal instance of how scrambled time is in this novel. The first sentence of Chapter 3 (p. 127): “It had never occurred to Howard to tell George about his own father.” This figure remains unnamed in the book, and almost unseen, even by Howard himself. He is a mysterious, almost ghostly, figure, whom Howard imagines can be in two places at once: he sees him seated at dinner, eating peas, but when he runs upstairs to his father’s study under the eaves, he’s there too, at his desk, scratching away at Sunday’s sermon. He watches his father in the yard, but if he glances away, and then returns his gaze, he’s gone. His father even comments on it, saying it was odd how I am here eating, and there too, working on his sermon. “Sometimes,” Howard thinks, “I spent entire dinners imagining myself in a sort of loop where I continually went between my father at his desk and my father at the dinner table” (p 127). He does, however, describe his father as a “strange, gentle man” (p. 128).

In a memory deep in a consideration of atmospheric phenomena, Howard would recall (we’re in the first person for this passage starting at p. 128) how the wind would affect his mood, his consciousness, and ruffle the water and grass,

“and spin the swallows in its choral voice stirring all of the old unnamable sorrows in our throats, where our voices caught and failed on the scales of the old forgotten songs. My father would say, The forgotten songs we never really knew, only think we remember knowing, when what we really do is understand at the same time how we have never really known them at all and how glorious they must really be. My father would tell me this from his desk up under the eaves while I was across the pond tracking otters or fishing off the fallen fir tree near the point. … He whispered in my ears: Bring string and bottle caps and broken glass; bring candy wrappers and nickels and smooth stones; bring fallen feathers and fingernail parings; the old songs have shaken our small home to the ground again and we must rebuild. And our house across the pond would flicker and then blink out, disappear, because it had been such a fragile idea in the first place. Then I would again be on the far shore, looking at where we would build our home, once we cleared the woods and dug the foundation.”

Howard’s father literally fades and falters; one wintry day four strangers arrive in a carriage—apparently they’re from his father’s congregation. Howard’s mother has told him that he’ll have to make his own breakfast that day, that she was “taking father.” “My mother opened the outside door and the light came in and carved every object in the kitchen into an ancient relic. I could not imagine what people had ever done with iron skillets or rolling pins.” (p. 138) In this sudden, searing, chiaroscuro image, Howard’s childhood kitchen suddenly becomes a museum exhibit, his own childhood and life become rootless in time. His suddenly mysterious kitchen belongs to an unknown historical epoch, existing as a complete mystery. It all makes a limp rag doll of time. His father is never a strong image in Howard’s memory, and his sermons were “bland and vague.” (p. 131) His departure on this coach is, however, permanent.

Immediately following the enigmatic passage where his father speaks to him from across the lake, and his house flickers and goes out, Howard suddenly wonders what it would be like to sit in that “cold silver water, that cold stone water up to my chin, …”(p. 129) This abrupt change introduces an uncanny reflection on Howard’s part (as a child in search of his father, whom he somehow doesn’t believe has died). The treatment of chronology is so fluid—readers can be forgiven if they think that the reminiscences occur as he’s an adult. Such uncertainties perplex us, particularly regarding Howard’s mental flights. He imagines his ghostly father is beside him in this quest, lecturing him mysteriously about the effect he has on nature, and how he should notice with special care the natural world around him—its changefulness: how Howard should notice the change he’s making to the stream as he sits in it, and how he should expect a strapping from his father’s disciplining belt because of the disturbance. Is his father cautioning Howard about interrupting the clean flow of time, which can only right itself if Howard stays still? This scene irrupts into the story again; it repeats in more detail in another fifteen pages, forming—what, a rupture? A loop? Simply a second imagining in Howard’s memory?

It is on page 144, where we return suddenly to the sitting-in-the-creek episode in Howard’s quest to find his father. This time we get more details: he has put on his father’s old boots and three pairs of socks because the boots are too big. He outfits himself with his father’s wide-brimmed hat, and carries his lunch in his father’s creel. Wild speculations about the scenes he passes follow, like imagining he finds his father’s teeth in an ear of corn, and climbing trees and tasting their sap for hints that his father had passed there. He looks for what his father called in his sermons the deep and secret yes, “an idea I never knew whether was his own or something he had read in his books.” (p. 141) During this walk, with its many weird and wild thoughts and images, we encounter the stunning observation of how nature had become a kaleidoscope during his trek. In the service of brevity, I omit to excerpt the passages; please refer to pages 142 to 143 for this other passage of vivid, colorful description of the natural forest.

Then the account shifts suddenly to the present tense, and Howard comes at length to the outlet of a stream into a pond. This account includes descriptions of Howards legs, beneath his rolled up jeans, as part of the natural world, apparently made up only of bone, and he looks, as he stands in the cold stream, as though he’s cut off at the knees. This is our intriguing repeated image from a few pages earlier. In his quest looking for his father, he sits down in the stream, and decides he will spend the night there. During this odd interlude, late at night, he hallucinates someone else’s face above the water a short way off, and it looks like one of the Indigenous characters in the book, called Old Sabbatis. This echo of an earlier speculation comes to involve an additional consideration of a second Native character, called Red. And Howard’s stream-bound consciousness takes up the chronology of the two: Red was more or less a successor to Old Sabbatis, hiring out to guide hunters in the back woods, and who became Old Red when Old Sabbatis disappeared. This occurred around 1896 or 1897—no one can agree on exactly when.

Of Old Sabbatis, Howard recalls him taking care of his father’s canoe over the winter, and associating him with the passage of seasons drenched in color: dark clouds whose silhouettes were

“traced by the sun and which were interspersed with the clearest and cleanest blue imaginable. When gold and red and brown leaves blow across paths and are taken up by circles of wind, it seems like the passing of time. When new buds light up wet black branches, they seem to burst forth from another side of time, which belonged to Sabbatis and men like my father. Of course Sabbatis is ancient only to me. My father is ancient, too, because both were men who passed from life when I was young.” (p.150)

Harding superbly demonstrates that time is an amorphous quantity, shifting around in Howard’s mind. This mirrors the human perception of time, in that a person’s life can assemble itself into strata and then become separate from it, and each epoch can contain much, but is only rarely parsed out for reminiscence or calculation. After the night in the stream and a quick rescue by laconic townsmen, Howard starts to walk home. This is where and when he suffers his first epileptic seizure. Afterward, he wanders around lost for a while, and finally walks his way back home.

Howard’s wife and children in their turn struggle with his epilepsy. I get the sense that Howard worries too much, composes too much unwritten poetry, and speculates about the divine unknowables, participates in time loops, and imagines the universe in wild flights, in ornate terms and in outré style. It feels as though all this mental exercise strains his capacity. His imaginative mins is strained and he pays a price—he suffers debilitating seizures. Who knows if Harding intended this connection?

Howard’s poetic flights of fancy sparkle and glow as he observes the universe around him, and capture the stunning spectacle as he sees it. His wife Kathleen thinks he’s an unambitious dreamer, utterly shiftless, and no one will ever convince her otherwise. But we observe creation in his eyes; his descriptions achieve a wonder of depth and imagination.

At a pivotal moment in the book—Christmas Day of 1926, as it turns out—Howard suffers a grand mal seizure in the kitchen of his home. It’s the first time his children have seen one. Howard’s wife Kathleen calmly reacts to his violent convulsions, and enlists George—aged 11 at the time—to help keep Howard’s tongue safe from his teeth. Howard unfortunately bites George’s hand before he can get the broom handle safely placed in place in his mouth. George does what he can to help his mother keep Howard uninjured during his fit. The other three children, younger and unreliable, can offer no help. However, George comprehends; he observes his father’s seizure and its resulting chaos in the kitchen—glasses and plates clattering around on the table, or falling and shattering on the floor. He observes how his brother and sisters panic, and the dog’s whining and barking (these italics are in the original, p. 86-87):

“… but my father was in the middle of it, strangely quiet, as if concentrating or distracted, as wires and springs and ribs and guts popped and exploded and unraveled and unhinged. He was smiling when he nearly bit my fingers off, or it felt like he did and that was quiet, too. My mother got hold of his chin and I forced the cedar stick into those bloody teeth, and I didn’t feel like I might be hurting a person anymore, which made me sicker. … Instead of terror, though, I thought, So this is what it is; I know what it is now. My father is not a werewolf or a bear or a monster and now I can run away.”

The very next day, Kathleen walks George to the doctor’s house, and the doctor, who is busy supervising the uprooting his house and transferring it over the road to its new situation closer to town, inspects George’s hand and decides that stitches are required. This same meeting, in the middle of a freezing road in Maine, results in Kathleen’s decision to have Howard committed to a state mental hospital—banished from her household. Having had to deal with one of Howard’s seizures at home, in front of her children, has shaken her. Such is her level of feeling for Howard that she must remove him from her home. Events follow rather quickly in this novel of stops and starts. The overwrought Kathleen takes a hatchet to the wood as evening falls in the freezing late Maine December. At p. 99:

“The wind was still up. But it will soften and die down when it gets dark, she thought. Wisps of snow were still on the wind, too, sweet and sharp. The sun was going down. It sank into the stand of beech trees beyond the back lot, lighting their tops, so that their bare arterial branches turned to a netting of black vessels around brains made of light. The trees lolled under the weight of those luminescent organs growing at the tops of their slender trunks. The brains murmured among themselves. They kept counsel and possessed a wintery wisdom—cold scarlet and opaline minds, brief and burnished, flaring in the metallic blue of dusk. And then they were gone. The light drained from the sky. … Kathleen thought, That is like Howard’s brain—lit and used up and then dark. Lit too brightly.”

Thus does she consider the barren and troublesome nature of her husband’s mind. Howard catches wind of her plan. However, before he can form any plan of his own in the face of this knowledge, his son George runs away. Howard has no difficulty finding him: he has taken the wagon and only gotten as far as the next property over, the Morrells’. Kathleen explains that he has to go out on his rounds without his wagon or Prince Edward, and Howard sees that she’s unreasonably demanding, totally impervious to discussion or reason. Howard follows the cart tracks to the next property—nothing easier in the snow—and finds George in the dark interior of one of the Morrell’s barns. George compliantly goes home with him.

At the moment he finds his son, Howard wishes for his son that he’d had a real chance for escape— “I just wish [he thinks] that you had made it beyond the bounds of this cold little radius,” (p. 117) and in the same sentence, launches into a detailed speculation about archeologists a million years hence, finding one of his son’s shinbones and labeling it juvenile male. They’ll note, he thinks, the injury to his hand, and surmise that it had been bitten by an adult, “perhaps as part of some savage ritual or because people were more like wild animals in this place in those times than had ever previously been imaged.” (p. 118) Howard feels deeply about his son’s attempt to get away: a deep love, and also frustration and a flood of pity. The two quietly go back home. But not before Howard’s mind ranges far into the future, to hypothetical scientists who will misinterpret their findings. So fluid is time, particularly in Howard’s imagination! He shortens time’s reins and tries to yoke it; but stretches and compresses, as plastic as anything in the universe—or moreso. Howard feels pressure from these speculations, understands his own involvement in the falling-apart of his life and his family. He is the unfortunate locus of irresistible forces, as his epilepsy disrupts his life and pushes him away from the life he has known.

The morning after he learns of Kathleen’s intention, he loads his cart up, hitches Prince Edward to it, and performs his rounds as usual. At the end of the day he bypasses his home and heads out of town, understanding that he will never enter that house again.

Consistent with Harding’s treatment of time throughout the novel, he starts it at its end, with Howard’s son George on his deathbed. (His family has rented a hospital bed, which takes up most of the living room.) Eighty year-old George hallucinates the physical collapse of the house he built decades ago; he imagines this as his family and some friends come by to pay their respects. George complains one night to whomever is sitting nearby that it’s “awful damned quiet.” Finally after a short back-and-forth, they figure out all the clocks in the living room had wound down.

“All the clocks in the room had wound down—the tambours and carriage clocks on the mantel, the banjo and mirror and Viennese regulator on the walls, the Chelsea ship’s bells on the rolltop desk, the ogee on the end table, and the seven-foot walnut-cased Stevenson grandfather’s clock, made in Nottingham in 1801, with its moon-phase window on the dial and pair of robins threading flowery buntings around the Roman numerals.” (p. 33)

So the young grandson or nephew winds them up so they’ll tick, but doesn’t wind the striking trains. That would be too loud. Nana, George’s wife, wouldn’t like that at all.

At books’s end, we’re treated to an engrossing scene, minutely told, of retired George sitting in his basement working on clocks. Here is the passage, p. 168 et seq:

“George sat at his desk at all hours of the day, and looking down through his bifocals and often through one or two lenses of a clip-on set of jewelers loupes down into the brass guts of clocks, pushing and pulling at arbors and gears and ratchets, humming non-existent melodies, which evaporated as he unconsciously composed them. In this setting, he drove numerous fidgety grandchildren to near madness, insisting that they sit in a hard chair and watch him hum and poke around to no apparent effect. This is the thing to get into, boy. I tell you, this is how you can make some bucks. There was a little to do, but try to pick out recognizable bits of songs from his humming, which none of the children could do, and listen to the way that the tickings of the different clocks, which not only lined the walls, but we’re also crowded onto several folding card tables, an old cot, and the shelves of a built-in bookcase, fell into and out of beat with one another. On rare occasions, every clock in the room seemed to tick at the same time. By the next tock, however, they all began to drift away from one another again, and George’s hapless victim would nearly weep at the prospect of having to sit still and listen again for the confluence. The only light in the room was one small wall lamp fitted with a forty-watt bulb and George’s fluorescent jeweler’s lamp, which was clamped to the desktop and could be pulled into almost any conceivable angle in order to illuminate almost any depths the works of a clock might present. This light provided the only other source of diversion, for the child condemned to witness the mysterious, agonizing, glacial, undramatic doings of antique clock repair: watching the dust float. The jeweler’s lamp brilliantly lit the dust in the air near whatever clock was being worked on. The rest of the room was dark with clocks and the evergreen wallpaper and so provided a perfect contrast to the front-lit specks of dust that floated down into or across the lamp’s halo. The child imagined the flecks were miniaturized ships exploring inner space: The giant is fixing the time machine. We can only hope that he doesn’t sneeze or make any sudden moves and create a vortex that will send us hopelessly off course. The ship is made only of lambswool and dander!”

In a book in which time is twisted and mashed, we finish with this scene in which a supernatural creature takes his own sweet time in a dark universe with light-colored floating specks, and works at a minute level to fix the measurement of time. He has an audience for whom all this is mysterious, beyond his comprehension, and maddening. How else would one describe the mysterious divine workings of time? Who is this Titan among all the timepieces? This book puts me in George’s basement; I feel like the child sitting and watching as he putters and hums. Which omnipotent Supreme Being is this? Is he fixing time or is he simply fixing ways of measuring it? Has something happened to time that it needs fixing? Is it possible? Why does Harding invoke the universe—light motes of matter floating in the dark, time passing in chaotic fashion, being measured by a series of devices which agree only occasionally—a different one for every mote, perhaps?—at the end of this time-bending novel? Einstein established that time intertwines with space, and that it travels differently for different people who are moving at different speeds. Is George the Ultimate Tinker, allowing time to travel at different speeds and follow different spaces for everyone?