If you are into tediously long sentences, this is the book for you. It may be that my attention span is too short, but all too often I found myself thinking where the hell did this sentence start, and is it ever going to end.
The plot involves a dying man, and the story of his father and grandfather. George Crosby, the dying man, fixes old mechanical clocks, which acts as a metaphor for much that goes on in the book. His father and grandfather have both been forced, by circumstances, to abandon their families. Their stories are interwoven with scenes from Crosby's death bed.
You can rightfully argue that the writing is accomplished. Here is an impressive passage:
Eighty-four hours before he died, George thought, Because they are like tiles loose in a frame, with just enough space so they can all keep moving around, even if it's only a few at a time and in one place, so that it doesn't seem like they are moving, but the empty space between them, and that empty space is the space that is missing, the last several pieces of colored glass, and when those pieces are in place, that will be the final picture the final arrangement. But those pieces, smooth and glossy and lacquered, are the dark tablets of my death, in gray and black, and bleached, drained, and until they are in place, everything else will keep on shifting. And so this end in confusion, where when things stop I never get to know it, and this moving is that space, is that what is yet to be, which is for others to see filled wherever it may finally be in the frame when the last pieces are fitted and the others stop, and there will be the stopped pattern, the final array, but not even that, because that final finitude will itself be a bit of scrolling, a pearlescent clump of tiles, which will generally stay together but move about within another whole and be mingled with in endless ways of other people's memories, so that I will remain a set of impressions porous and open to combination with all of the other vitreous squares floating about in whoever else's frames, because there is always the space left in reserve for the rest of their own time, and to my great-grandchildren, with more space than tiles, I will be no more than the smoky arrangement of a set of rumors, and to their great-grandchildren I will be no more than a tint of some obscure color, and to their great grandchildren nothing they ever know about, and so what army of strangers and ghosts has shaped and colored me until back to Adam, until back to when ribs were blown from molten sand into the glass bits that took up the light of this world because they were made from this world, even though the fleeting tenants of those bits of colored glass have vacated them before they have had even the remotest understanding of what it is to inhabit them, and if they-if we are fortunate (yes, I am lucky, lucky), and if we are fortunate, have fleeting instants when we are satisfied that the mystery is ours to ponder, if never to solve, or even just rife personal mysteries, never mind those outside-are there even mysteries outside? a puzzle itself-but anyway, personal mysteries, like where is my father, why can't I stop all the moving and look out over the vast arrangements and find by the contours and colors and qualities of light where my father is, not to solve anything but just simply even to see it again one last time, before what, before it ends, before it stops. But it doesn't stop; it simply ends. It is a final pattern scattered without so much as a pause at the end, at the end of what, at the end of this. - Kindle Loc. 520-38
I might admire the person who could write this, but it makes me dizzy to read.
After finishing the book, I went and looked at the comments on Amazon. It seems I am not the only person who noticed the striking similarity to the writing of Marilynne Robinson. Robinson's books Gilead and Home also deal with old men reconsidering their lives, and all three books have a pensive and reflective tone about them.
Robinson teaches at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where Harding has recently studied, so the influence appears to have been rather direct. They say that "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery", but that does not mean that it always works out. Robinson is one of my favorite writers. In my opinion, her writing is far more lucid than Harding's.
I think Tinkers could have made one, two or three good short stories, but for me in it's current form it did not work.
At the risk of sounding as cranky as H.L. Mencken, I will add one more point. What exactly is the problem with quotation marks? This is not the first book that I have read recent where the author disposed of quotes to mark dialogue. Maybe the lack of quotes is supposed to give the work a more stream of consciousness feel, but I for one find it annoying to have to constantly try to figure out if I am reading dialogue or description. This problem is made worse in this book, when it is difficult to remember where what you are currently reading actually started.
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