Scott Axsom's Reviews > Tinkers

Paul Harding’s Tinkers is a profoundly moving meditation on death and time. I gave the book five stars and would rank it among the best of its kind. That’s why I was particularly shocked, after finishing it, to see the overall rating of 3.3 among Goodreads users. Nonetheless, I do have a good idea why Tinkers resonated so deeply with me personally. Harding manages to describe the process of dying in much the same way that I’ve imagined it since losing my first close friend at the age of eighteen. I’ve lost far too many more dear friends since then and each time I've pondered death a little more deeply. But despite those often desperate efforts, each subsequent death has found me, once again, wholly unprepared. As such, this novel sheds some welcome light into one of the darker corners of my understanding.

Tinkers is one in a long line of Pulitzer-winning novels that deals passionately with the concept of time and it does so in the context of the protagonist’s impending demise. The novel takes place during the final eight days in the life of an 80 year-old man, marking down the hours to his death. Talk about poignant. Talk about focused. And yet, the narrative occasionally ranges off into momentary anarchy, showing the protagonist’s inability to maintain focus in his final hours, demonstrating the delicate, often uncontrollable, natures of the human psyche, of life and, most of all, of death. The most beautiful elements of the book, to me, were Harding’s descriptions of death itself:

“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.”

Harding gives a circumspect, if meandering, view of the conventions of time and space in the context of death and, in doing so, he provides a spectacularly insightful examination of life itself. He places the concept of “reality” in its proper place and questions whether there is any such thing, when placed against the larger backdrop of death. For such an immense subject, Tinkers is barely more than a novella. In less than 200 pages, Harding delves into the beauty of dew on a flower petal, the undying love between fathers and sons, and the question of whether time and space exist anywhere but within our selves. Tinkers is a deeply philosophical dialectic couched in the very simple story of a man’s life and death, and I’ve read nothing that comes closer to helping me comprehend the wondrous, and frighteningly diaphanous, nature of our existence.