Tinkers, by Paul Harding, is available now at Buffalo Street Books
David Nelson Pollock reviews Tinkers, Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
ON THE SURFACE, Tinkers is a book about generations of American men, a novel full of flashbacks that begins and ends with narration of the death of eighty-something George Washington Crosby. George is a clock repair man. He loves clocks more than anything else in the world, including people. Am omniscient third-person narrator reveals the story of young George as he deals with his father Howard’s epilepsy. Within this story is the story of young Howard, who grapples with his own father’s madness.
Tinkers just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and reviewers have portrayed it as something of an anomaly. The New York Times wrote about the novel as a Cinderella story: talented author pens first novel, has novel rejected because it is too slow, novel is picked up by small press (Bellevue Literary Press) and wins big award. Perhaps in terms of distribution and marketing, Mr. Harding’s book is a rare Pulitzer winner, but in terms of content, it’s a fairly common American story.
In some ways, Tinkers brings to mind another Pulitzer winner: Phillip Roth’s turgid 1997 novel American Pastoral. Roth’s book is bigger. It tries to make a grandiose statement. Harding’s novel is smaller, and although it spans three generations, it does so microscopically. It’s not hard to imagine that Harding’s novel might have been constructed from three different short stories. What the two novels share is a fascination with the American myth of production. Both novels feature characters who believe that product holds a deeper meaning, that the purpose of life is mirrored in the process and result of production. For Tinkers, it’s George and his thing for clocks. In American Pastoral, it’s American beef-head Swede who makes gloves.
Roth’s book is bogged down with his descriptions of how a fine glove is constructed. The care put into a fine glove is no longer appreciated by these kids today, who apparently do things like blow up post offices instead. No matter if you like American Pastoral or not (I do not; I prefer Roth the transgressive lyricist (Sabbath’s Theater) to Roth the American mouthpiece), Swede’s fascination with the glove lies in the fact that it is something he makes. It’s a love affair with craftsmanship that chokes up Swede. Compared to the sexualized, deviant radicals of Roth’s book, the Swede is more or less sane—boring, but sane.
George’s fascination with clocks, on the other hand, is not about craftsmanship, though this is part of it. In Tinkers, the clock becomes equated with the human; in some respects, the clock outsizes the human in terms of relevance. The narrator of Harding’s Tinkers is from a universe described by J. Baudrilliard in his early post-Marxist work, where the people of affluence (Western Europeans, Americans, you and me) are surrounded by objects instead of people. “We are living the period of the objects,” Baudrillard wrote in 1970. “Today, it is we who are observing their birth, fulfillment, and death.” Though Harding’s novel may be about generations of American men in a country that has been changing for the worse (industrialization, highways, et al), it is told from the perspective of a voice that has already been assimilated into the system of objects. Tinkers is the sound of Baudrillardian simulation acknowledging itself by simulating its own historical escape velocity; in science-fiction terms, it’s the android pretending to be human.
There are plenty of objects in the novel, clocks being the most “meaningful” or “symbolic.” But the people are objects too, and so are death, the future, and the afterlife, all understandable only through the interplay of objects. As he lay on his deathbed, George listens to the clocks for comfort. His grandchildren, his wife, they are around, but they are faceless, they have no significance. It’s the clocks he loves and repairs, they “breathe and … give one another comfort by merely being in one another’s presence, like a gathering of people at a church dinner …” George also believes that the “final finitude will itself be a bit of scrolling, a pearlescent clump of tiles, which will generally stay together.” And in a flash-forward, George’s widow knows “without a doubt that her fastidious ghost of a husband [is] drifting around in the living room, inspecting each machine through his bifocals.” This is fitting: our protagonist returns from the dead, not to speak to the living, but to re-engage with his lovely objects with tickers that tick more vibrantly than human hearts.
This is all fine and dandy, but Harding’s narrator wishes to reach outside of the simulated universe. Indeed, a majority of the book occurs in the rustic past. This is problematic. These past sequences are supposed to uncover forgotten America. But the simulation can only simulate. Harding’s uncorrupted forests, his hardworking salesmen, his barn houses on fire, his mules, they are characters of a literary theme park. Take the Indians, Red and Sabbatis. They are characters in George’s father Howard’s childhood. We are supposed to see a story of extinction in these two Indians, how the younger was “less tame” than the older. Harding writes that Red had “become the embodiment of some eternal thing that itself stood outside of time.” It seems that Harding wants to do for vanished America what W.G. Sebald did for Western Europe, to piece back together its damaged architecture and rescue the stories of its queer wanderers who lingered in the shadows, leaving behind only journal entries and photographs. But Sebald understood the playful nature of the fact, and that history was a marauder who mutated its subjects as often as it brought them back to life. Sebald’s attention to detail, and therefore to artificiality (for one begets the other), allowed his work to transcend the simulated reality of which Harding’s voice is victim. Harding’s Indians belong to no tribe, they have no family or sex. They do not incite fear or sympathy. Their mystery is their ambiguity.
Even the heart of Tinkers is suspect: the feeling is second-hand. We see the characters at best as damaged objects. This is what young George sees after he finds his father, who has suffered from an epileptic seizure: “There was spit in his father’s hair and blood on his chin. His father sat, snorting rapid breaths …” Sympathy is evoked in the reader, but to no meaningful end. We know only what George must have felt, because we know how we would feel to see our own father so helpless. The sympathy evoked in the reader is the basest kind: kitsch.
The relationships among the members of the child George’s family reveal the novel’s underlying inhumanity. There is the adult Howard, George’s father, who feels guilty for being epileptic and biting his son’s hand during a seizure. When young George runs away, Howard wants to find his son, but part of him wishes his son really would escape. Young George, on the other hand, loves his father, but he is angry at him. He is confused because he feels bad for his father, but he also wants to get some kind of revenge. And George’s mother, Howard’s wife, Kathleen, she is hardworking and tough. She holds the family together. She is so tough that she is afraid she is not loving enough.
The characters read like types and they go no deeper. It’s not until Kathleen reveals a brochure for a mental hospital where she wants to send epileptic Howard that the story of this family seems suddenly real. She leaves the brochure out so that the members of the family can find it. There is an inherent irony in the brochure because it advertises the hospital as a hotel. The characters are suddenly confused. Like a banshee, the brochure suddenly haunts the rustic house, the first instance of modern branding in the novel. It’s not the characters who speak to us, it’s the appearance of this object and its two-sided language. This is where the river runs deepest in the Crosby household. As young George struggles with the confusing message of a hospital that is advertised as a comfortable hotel, the reader enjoys the voyeuristic pleasure that only dramatic irony has to offer (Hamlet stabbing Polonius behind the curtain).
The moments when Harding really seems to transcend the simulated universe are in the instances of stream of consciousness, a modernist device that beautifully fails our author’s purpose. The interior monologues go nowhere and certainly do not reflect actual thought patterns. As a matter of fact, the narrative here becomes downright pataphysical. Here is Howard thinking about the night as he walks with his mule: “water sac 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…” What’s he talking about? No idea. But there’s a poetry to the nonsense language that is far more interesting than what is allowed by this suffocated mythology that is posing as nostalgia. Harding claims to let Howard talk this way because Howard considers himself a kind of poet. We know the real reason Harding allows this kind of speak: it’s Harding who’s the poet, and he has to indulge. Let him. As Baudrillard said in a 1996 interview: Pataphysics is “a way of surpassing physics and metaphysics … of surpassing the opposition of body and soul, of knowledge and nothingness … Pataphysics signals the end of reality.” There is no better prescription for the American literature of simulation.
David Nelson Pollock is a contributing culture editor for The Ithaca Post. He is also an editor of and contributor to the literary journal Essays & Fictions.