Concentration. It just declines during these few hot months. It’s perfectly natural and cannot be helped. Dank humidity and specious outdoorsy activity hamper our typically more ambitious natures, and what begins as motions toward self-improvement and deep, recharging relaxation fizzle into mosquito bites, sunburn and profound afternoon napping. Summer reading, too, becomes dominated by read-it-once paperback thriller-dillers concerning vengeful ladies with unusual body art, or, if you’re not into that kind of thing, the vampirish undead. Drop it by the poolside mid-chapter, pick it up later. No biggie.
Sometimes, I want it to be winter again. Or powerfully air-conditioned.
Item: Paul Harding’s Tinkers (it won the Pulitzer)
Prose that is distilled, word by word, into the pastoral recollections of the dying George Crosby, husband, father, hobby-horologist, who, eight days before his death, begins hallucinating family history in a very readable 3rd person. The story focuses, for the most part, on his father and the home in which George had been raised. “Mornings began in the dark. They began with setting the home in order for the day, so that it might already be industrious when the sun climbed first the invisible horizon and then the branches of the dark trees.”
George’s father, Howard Crosby, after a self-induced water accident leaves him prone to epileptic seizures, feels that “the quilt of leaves and light and shadow and ruffling breeze might part and [I’d] be given a glimpse of what is on the other side; a stitch might work itself loose or be worked loose. 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 stars –had somehow been worked loose by the wind…which I was lucky enough to spot…” Plying household wares from a homemade mule-cart, Howard is part mystic and half-hero to the yokels of the surrounding county who rely on his laundry soap and secret moonshine. At one strange turn, he even serves as dentist to a local hermit, an ancient, once-respected intellectual and old schoolfellow of Nathaniel Hawthorne. To his family, however, Howard is a poor provider; an enigmatic, taciturn creature given to ruining family meals with his absent-mindedness and fits that leave him “baffled by his diet of lightning”. Nobody (save, perhaps, his mother), feels this more than George.
Tinkers is not a generously-poured, ice-cold summer beverage to be slugged down between innings. It is a piping-hot cup of tea, to be savored, steeped, and sipped slowly. It is compelling as any savvy thriller, but without the encumbrance of some rigor-mortis plotline being marched out in a new dust-jacket. At just under 200 pages, Tinkers will satisfy your intellect without consuming your entire weekend. Do yourself a favor: turn up the A/C and set aside some quality time for yourself and this deceptively light little paperback.