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REVIEW: Workshop alum's Tinkers an astonishing debut

By Emily Grosvenor

Only the rarest of fiction can get away with revealing a book’s ending in a very first sentence such as this one: “George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died.”

In the case of Paul Harding’s debut novel Tinkers, this tiny but revolutionary act is but the first sign that this book offers a distinctly satisfying literary experiment — a chance to brush aside the conceits of plot and chronology and to move fluidly outside of time and space. In doing so, Tinkers conjures up the story of a life as well as the story of a death. The ease and beauty with which Harding’s accomplishes this is what has made this wisp of a novel at 191 pages — an astonishing release from a little-known new publishing house called the Bellevue Literary Press — a surprise bestseller among readers of literary fiction.

Harding will read from his novel at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Iowa City's Prairie Lights Books, 15. S. Dubuque St. The reading will be webcasted live at the Writing University web site.

The owner of this story is George Crosby, a retired math teacher, guidance counselor and amateur tinkerer who lies for eight days on his death bed as his body is ravaged by illness and his mind succumbs to the wild leaps and time shifts of a man losing consciousness.

In many ways, Crosby’s story is an everyman’s story — the milestones and roles that comprise his life could be compressed in an obituary of a few hundred words (and are on page 19). But Harding, a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and an instructor of creative writing at Harvard University, is a master of championing the quiet heroism of small acts. While there seems no logical progression to the scenes and moments that Harding plucks from Crosby’s memory to tell, those that he does choose — Crosby watching his father suffer a seizure, Crosby getting nicked while shaving on his death bed — carry the weight of myth when filtered through individual consciousness.

Within his muddled mind, Crosby finds the freedom to reconnect with his estranged father and to forge an assessment of his own life — a necessary task whose impossibility doesn’t make the trying any less meaningful. Harding describes this process of dying like looking at “a shifting mass, the tiles of a mosaic spinning, swirling, reportraying, always in recognizable swaths of colors, familiar elements, molecular units, intimate currents, but also independent now if his will, showing him a different self every time he tried to make an assessment.”

Quite fittingly, Harding equates the haunting image of a clock that has wound down to a man’s life, an apt metaphor that reappears throughout the book. But perhaps what is most remarkable about Tinkers is the approach Harding uses to capture the mundane act of remembering on the page. “The field was an abandoned lot. The remnants of an old house, long since fallen into ruin, stood at the back of the field,” George thinks to himself as he tried to piece together an especially deep-buried memory.

It is comforting to come across a book like Tinkers when news of our reading culture’s slow demise is told in newspaper headlines nearly every day. Books like Tinkers offer a sobering reminder to writers and readers alike that you don’t need fancy high-concept structures to lure attentions, you don’t need exaggerated dramas to connect with a character, and you don’t need larger-than-life figures outside of the realm of most of our experiences to find communion with other human souls through literature.