Tinkers by Paul Harding

While my girls threw snowballs down each others' necks this morning I curled up under a warm blanket and finished this small paperback novel which won the very big Pulitzer Prize (2010).  When I saw that Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead and Home, endorsed this book and the author, Paul Harding, has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, my interest was piqued.  In only 191 pages and four chapters Harding blends the fuzzy lines between memory, dream, and imagination in the mind of George Washington Crosby as he lies dying on a hospital bed set up in his own dining room.  At times the book reads more like an extensive poem than a novel as it brings to life surprisingly simple people in a deeply spiritual way.  Marilynne Robinson writes that the novel "confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls."    This is a book to be read slowly, perhaps twice, to savor all it offers.

Here is a little taste.  A character in the novel is chopping wood in a Maine winter....

Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife...but even that is better than nothing at all, isn't it?  As you split frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God's will and His grace toward you and that that is beautiful, and part of a greater certainty...as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it  (Harding 72).