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192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
This is the season—preserving done, woodpile high, north wind up and getting cold, night showing up earlier every day, dark and ice pressing down from the north, down on the raw wood of their cabins, on the rough-cut rafters that sag and sometimes snap from the weight of the dark and the ice, burying families in their sleep, the dark and the ice and sometimes the red in the sky through trees: the heartbreak of a cold sun.The underlying nature of life, of reality lies just beyond our grasp
The true essence, the secret recipe of the forest and the light and the dark was far too fine and subtle to be observed with my blunt eye—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 and ruffling breezes might part and I’d be given a glimpse of what is on the other side;It is clear that what we see is not all there is.
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 spaces than tiles, I will be no more than the smoky arrangement of a set of rumors, 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 AdamGeorge, who repairs clocks, has a fear of impermanence that is matched by his tinker father, Howard, who in turn contemplates the passing of his own father, a minister succumbing to madness.
It seemed to me as if my father simply faded away. He became more and more difficult to see…He leaked out of the world gradually, though. At first, he seemed merely vague or peripheral. But then he could no longer furnish the proper frame for his clothes…the end came when we could no longer even see him, but felt him in brief disturbances of shadow or light, or as a slight pressure, as if the space one occupied suddenly had had something more packed into it, or we’d catch some faint scent out of season, such as the snow melting into the wool of his winter coatBut it is not death alone that gives birth to dissolution. Howard contemplates a separation short of passing
So there is my son, already fading. The thought frightened him. The thought frightened 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.This held particular sting for me, as my youngest is fluttering away to college in a few short weeks, and I contemplate the space she leaves behind.
The weaver might have made one bad loop in the foliage of a sugar maple by the road and that one loop of whatever the thread might be wound from –light, gravity, dark from start—had somehow been worked loose by the wind in its constant worrying of white buds and green leaves and blood-and-orange leaves and bare branches and two of the pieces of whatever it is that this world is knot from had come loose from each other and there was maybe just a finger width’s hole, which I was lucky enough to spot in the glittering leaves from this wagon of drawers and nimble enough to scale the silver trunk and brave enough to poke my finger into the tear, that might offer to the simple touch a measure of tranquility or reassurance.He shifts his perspectives from George to Howard to lesser characters, and includes in his tale entries from what I took to be a series of lectures by Howard’s pastor-father, and entries from a supposed book on Horology. Some might find these troublesome as they definitely interrupt the narrative flow, but they did not seem too intrusive to me.
"And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough."The ideas this little square book tackles are also profound enough and quite literary - thus the Pulitzer. It's the memory and identity and life as seen through dying, and dreams and pain and inevitable disappointments and humiliations, and the family relationships that define our complicated selves. Especially those of fathers and sons (once immortalized by Turgenev - Fathers and Sons), full of hurt and pain, unexpected love and tenderness, and - hopefully - that one final moment of understanding.
"But after a handful of such stories, he began to talk about his father and his mother, his brother, Joe, and his sisters, about taking night courses to finish school and about becoming a father. He talked about blue snow and barrels of apples and splitting frozen wood so brittle that it rang when you split it. He talked about what it is like to be a grandparent for the first time and to think about what it is you will leave behind when you die. By the time the tape ran out an hour and a half later (after he had flipped it over once, almost without being conscious of doing so), and the RECORD button sprang up with a buzz, he was openly weeping and lamenting the loss of this world of light and hope."Oh yes, the unexpected beauty of simplest things in life and the beauty and pain of family are the driving force behind Tinkers.
"When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up, and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart."---------------
"When he realized that the silence by which he had been confused was that of all of his clocks having been allowed to wind down, he understood that he was going to die in the bed where he lay."George, a clock-repairmen in his retirement, reflects on his father, Howard Crosby - the titular tinker of the 1920s backwoods, equipped with a cart, a mule, a list of items for sale and a soul of a poet or an artist trapped in a tinker's existence - and burdened with his dark secret: epilepsy which he hides from his children, a wife who is quiet and resilient and, as Howard eventually comes to see, resentful, as well as his son George whom he loves but who is deeply traumatized having had his father bite his hand during one of his grand mal seizures.
"His despair had not come from the fact that he was a fool; he knew he was a fool. His despair came from the fact that his wife saw him as a fool, as a useless tinker, a copier of bad verse from two-penny religious magazines, an epileptic, and could find no reason to turn her head and see him as something better."Howard is keenly attuned to the unexpected beauty of the world, enhanced further through his surreal quite-hallucinatory pre-seizure aura experiences. But what the rest of the world sees is a tinker crippled by his disease, a burden, a symbol of life gone wrong, a source of shame. Howard rebels - even though it means leaving his family behind. And years later, his son now retired is spending time tinkering with the clocks - tinkering like his father did, with clocks symbolizing pretty much everything your sharply attuned by your college English courses peppered with meanings and symbols and literary analysis and the significance of Holden Caulfield's hunting hat.
“The end came when we could no longer even see him, but felt him in brief disturbances of shadow or light, or as a slight pressure, as if the space one occupied suddenly had had something more packed into it… The world fell away from my father the way he fell away from us. We became his dream.”
page 66
"-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 simplify 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."