What is it about Maine that seems to have spawned so many great writers or writers writing about it? Ann Beattie lives there; Robert Coffin, the Pulitzer poet was born there as is Stephen King who set Carrie in his home state, as were Mary McCarthy and Kenneth Roberts and Harriet Beecher Stowe; Richard Russo is a Maniac who set Empire Falls in the fictional eponymous Maine town; Olive Kitteridge is set in Crosby, Maine; and Tinkers by Paul Harding is set in the fictional town of Enon, Maine.
I am fully prepared to believe there is something in the water in Maine, or something about the light, or maybe it has to do with its winters. Or is it a land that time forgets? Certainly time, winter, light and water are motifs employed to great effect in this novel. And memory, that unreliable personal record of time.
The novel opens. . .
. . .as George Washington Crosby lies dying in a hospital bed set in the dining room of the house he built, a room -- as is the house -- filled with the clocks he loved to tinker with, filled with memories that he clutches at in his hallucinatory state induced by the build up of uric acid in his failing body. Mostly, he is trying to recapture his father, Howard Aaron Crosby, itinerant hardware salesman, tinkerer, and epileptic.
The novel takes place over Crosby's final eight days -- his life winding down in the same space of time it takes his clocks to do so. In his hallucinatory dream state Crosby thinks the roof is falling in on him, symbolic objects of his life litter the bed, he looks up and up, past the ceiling, the roof, the sky, out into the universe.
Immediately Harding's language flows over us. "Tinker, tinker. Tin, tin, tin. Tintinnabulation." Again and again, Harding beats a rhythm of life, of ticking clocks, in a rhythm of words. Later, when Charlie is in the sick-room with George:
This is a book. It is a book I found in a box. The box was in the attic under the eaves. The attic was hot and still. The air was stale with dust. The dust was from old pictures and books. The dust in the air was made up of the book I found. I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it.
There are examples and examples of hypnotic sentence structure that put the reader into a trance state, appropriate to the mood of the novel.
The language is more than rhythmic, it's stunningly vivid, whether describing Kathleen futilely chopping at the ice with her axe in an attempt to commit suicide, or describing Howard in the throes of an epileptic fit, splashed with his own blood, biting onto his son's hand, drumming his heels, and vibrating to the "explosion of lightning" that shakes his body.
While death over-arches the story, poetry underlines it. Howard is a natural poet; poetry fills the memories George has of his childhood. Sensuous sibilants abound: "Silver," "silvery," "skin" and "scales" segue into "birch." But poetry cannot keep poverty at bay. Hardscrabble, want, make-do, and do without are all George's family and neighbors have known. There is no possibility of dreams coming true, especially women's dreams, and Kathleen makes everyone pay for what she cannot have.
Their lives, at once so flat, spare, and constrained are lifted out of the mundane into the brilliant because Harding picks and provides illuminating detail. The novel is full of lists: lists of the contents of the rooms of George's house -- Queen Anne chair, Persian rug, dining table, still life painting; lists of the tasks Howard performs on his selling circuit -- fish a drowned child from the creek, cut the hair of a 19-year-old groom, pull a tooth from Gilbert the hermit.
Again and again, these people, so common and ordinary take on an extraordinary aspect. Their emotions reflect the setting: In Kathleen frozen like the Maine winter, in Howard burgeoning like the exuberant Maine spring, in George concentrated as a Maine summer. The kindnesses -- the tender mercies -- they perform for each other and for others outside the family is to me the most poignant quality of the novel. But when I think of memorable scenes, I remember when Howard comes upon the 12-year old George who is peering at something on the ground that turns out to be a dead field mouse.
Secretly and in hiding, Howard watches his son as he constructs a shroud, a birch bark ship, and sets the corpse of the mouse aboard it, lights a coal, and shoves the Viking mouse off on its journey to Valhalla. The high drama of the ordinary incident takes on a spiritual quality that permeates the novel.
Next time we meet, I hope to write about topics and points raised in your comments. The technique of fractionating time, scene, and incident employed by Harding is one such topic. Why George runs away after his father's Christmas epileptic seizure, the significance of that act is another. How epilepsy is treated in the book. What the names of the animals may indicate (or not) about the characters. The constant intrusion of Nature in George's dying stream-of consciousness. Why this novel reminds me of Gilead, Ironweed, Virginia Woolf, and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Is the novel about George, or is it about Howard? And how did you feel about the tale of the Budden family, the burning of their home, and the burnt door in the barn where George is found by Howard the day he runs away.
Better yet, you tell me what resonates with you after having read Tinkers. And let me know: Should this relatively unknown novel have won the Pulitzer?