As it turns out, none of you felt Tinkers did not deserve the Pulitzer. I'm glad. Such a beautiful book seems to deserve an extra-special prize all its own. Something called, perhaps, the Heart of Insight Prize? While we concentrated on techniques and overviews in our last meeting, I want to look at Parts 3 and 4 today. Well written books are notable for their organization, among other qualities. As a reader, I always take note of what happens in the mid-point of a novel. In Tinkers, George runs away from home upon discovering that his mother, Kathleen, is considering putting Howard into a mental hospital.
Really, I'm interested in book's beginnings, middles, and ends. With a tree book, I invariably flip the pages to those places and scan before I commence the long read. Tinkers begins in George's terminal hallucinatory state, where we stay throughout the book, stay within his dying brain, awash in his mind's final ruminations and learn, at the end, that for all the running away that is done in this book, the last memory George has before he dies is being reunited with his father.
Of course, the ultimate irony is that he is about to be reunited with Howard in death.
Of course, Tinkers is, in one way, a novel about fathers leaving sons and abandoned sons seeking fathers. In a larger sense it is about union and reunion of all things in Nature.
George runs away from the realization that he's about to lose his father due to his mother's impending decision to put him in the Maine State Hospital. The fact is, he's about to lose him because, echoing his son's act, Howard runs away from his wife and children. He goes to Philadelphia and creates a new identity and life for himself, never returning to his first family. Further, Howard is defying his father's fate, a man led away by Howard's mother to the carriage that would transport him to the asylum, his mind fractured and broken. Echo and re-echo the life patterns of fathers and sons.
After Howard departs, I felt that Harding went to work with a vengeance fractionating time, light, and water -- awash in silver, the shimmering and dominant color. Three motifs that saturate the novel. We are jerked from present to past, from one mind to another, to reality and dream. Seldom have I felt that I'd lived a lifetime after reading a book, especially one in which the "real" action lasts only eight days, and never leaves the dying man's bedside. Harding tinkers with time, breaking it, repairing it, bending it, and turning it to suit his purpose.
Equally as strong an element for the author's manipulation to keep us in a submersed and dream-like state all during our reading, is his tinkering with light. There are three mentions of light in Chapter 1, taken from the pages of the book in the attic, George's mad parson grandfather's journal: Cosmos Borealis: light skin of sky and cloud and mountain on the still pond; Crepuscule Borealis: The bark of birches glows silver; Tempest Borealis: The sky turned silver.
The instances are many, but the most powerful and most demonstrative, I believe, of Harding's prowess, are the parallel manipulations of light when Howard finds George hiding in the dark tool shed, and of water when as a boy, Howard, searches for his father in the silvery waters at Tagg Pond, when water and light are united.
In the first instance, Howard's mind is flooded with the memory of the tragic fire that took the lives of A woman and two children, believed to be Addie Budden and her kids, but they were not. The memory is triggered when Howard notices George has been secreting himself behind the door of that burned house -- all that survived. Here is what he thinks.
So, there is my son, already fading, The thought frightened him. The thought frightened him because as soon as it came to him he knew that it was true. He understood suddenly that even though his son knelt in front of him, familiar, mundane, he was already fading away, receding. His son was receding before his eyes and that fact was inevitable, even though Howard understood, too, that the fading was yet to begin in any actual sense, that at that moment he and his son, the father standing in dimness, the son kneeling and partly obscured by the door, were still only heading, not yeat arrived, toward the point where the fading would begin.
Howard is highly attuned to the compelling forces of Nature, the coming into being and the going out of existence of all living things. He's also hinting to us that he will effect his own disappearance and that he will forget his own son, erasing himself from George's life and erasing George from his mind's eye.
And at the end of the novel, while reading in bed, he envisions himself, reduced to a soul released from the saline column of his body, the actual self, yet a shadow, a distinction, yet an ineffable union with the Cosmos. And entranced with his thoughts, he falls asleep and dies.
When George's father, Howard, is a boy, after his own father has been carted away, he decides to find him in the woods. His walk is a long description of dancing leaf-shattered light, a kaleidoscope of light, until he reaches Tagg Pond. Howard seeks submersion in water, where he hopes to find in "the light and the water the way they are when he is not present, and that that might tell him something about his father." He has a vision of an Indian's head floating in the water, reflecting a mirage of his own position up to his neck. What he learns is that his memories of his father (and Old Sabbatis, the Indian) are atmospheres. As ephemeral as light reflected on water, as ephemeral as the life spark. Howard says, "I realized then how slight, how fragile it was. . .how it was just like my father disappearing, or the house, when seen from the water, flickering and blinking out."
Image after image refers us to fading, ephemeral life.
It isn't until Ch. 4 that the borealis references return. Cometa Borealis, one thinks of it as life's comet "burned away to nothing" as it plunges through the atmosphere of the Earth. Another long passage from Rev. Davenport's The Reasonable Horologist describes the escape mechanism of a wind-up clock that releases its energy as the clock winds down. 8 days for a wind up clock to come to a stop, for marked time to come to a standstill, the exact time of our novel. Domestica Borealis the hearth fires, the heart fires, extinguish.
Seventy years. . .ninety-six hours. . .eighty-four hours. . . forty-eight hours. . .George "thought he was a clock." Homo borealis the light of mankind, the reunion of the individual with the Cosmos.
When it came time to die, we knew and went to deep yards where we lay down our bones and our bones turned to brass. We were picked over. We were used too fix broken clocks, music boxes; our pelvises were fitted into pinions, our spines soldered into vast works. Our ribs were fitted as gear teeth and tapped and clicked like tusks. This is how finally we were joined.
Good-bye George, good-bye. The novel is finished. We are left to reunite ourselves with the Universe.
-----------------------------------------------
There is one thing in the novel that I did not understand, and felt (because of my lack of understanding?) that it did not fit, that it was jarring. Towards the end of the book, after Nikki, the nurse's, visit, Harding inserts an excerpt about building a bird's nest out of a wafer of tinker's tin "from a lost pamphlet by Howard Aaron Crosby."
If someone would explain to me what I should understand about its inclusion (where and why it is in the novel), I'd be grateful!
I received excellent suggestions from bookgirl for our next read. Especially intriguing is her idea that Eleanor Brown's The Weird Sisters be taken up by our ebook club. Sadly, after looking into it, the book is too expensive for Kindle purchase and breaks one of our rules.
So, I have chosen a different novel, perhaps in the vein of Brown? At our next meeting we'll begin discussing Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen.
Amazon pricing for all media here. Kindle price: $7.14.
Powell's Adobe edition: $7.09
See you back here, same day, same time July 28th!