It seems like a good book for Portland, Paul Harding said of his new
novel Tinkers. “Perfect for a gloomy Saturday afternoon.”
Harding was speaking to a small crowd at the Someday Lounge on Monday,
January 19, at the first-ever, Powell’s hosted Indiespensable Happy
Hour. Indiespensable is a subscription-based book club that features
special-edition printings of books from independent publishing
houses—Tinkers, out from Bellevue Literary Press, is the
eighth book in the series, and while it’s too late to score the
sold-out indiespensable edition, the book is still worth picking
up.
Tinkers is a remarkable debut that superimposes a dying man’s
reminiscences with those of his father, a tinker (odds and ends
salesman) in rural Maine, and his grandfather, a preacher in even
more rural Maine. It’s a methodical little book—the main
character is a horologist, a repairer of clocks—that marries an
interest in the world’s works and gears with remarkably lifelike
descriptions of nature. And in leapfrogging between three generations
of men, Harding subtly delineates a changing world; a father is paid in
nickels, a son in $100 bills. Harding is a particularly gifted nature
writer, resisting any drift toward the over-poetic and sticking to
spare, straightforward sentences that have a lot to offer.
The tinker, Howard, has epilepsy, and one day in the fugue state
that precedes a seizure he finds himself in a field, after a storm, at
the end of spring:
“Howard closed his eyes and inhaled. He smelled cold water and cold,
intrepid green. Those early flowers smelled like cold water. Their
fragrance was not the still perfume of high summer; it was the mineral
smell of cold, raw green. He crouched to look at a daffodil. Its
six-petaled corona was fully unfurled, like a bright miniature sun. A
bee crawled in its cup, massaging stigma and anther and style. Howard
leaned as closely as he dared (he imagined sniffing the poor bee into
his nose, the subsequent sting, the unfortunate wound, the plucked and
dead creature on its back in the flattened, cold grass) and inhaled
again. “