“Tinkers” patiently traces the meandering memory of a dying clockmaker as he recalls his boyhood, his painstaking craft and his mother’s placement of his epileptic father in a mental hospital. Harding moves through time with Proustian grace. No detail is too small for him to stop the narrative clock and stare. During a scene in which a man shaves his grandfather not only do we take in the “rust on the bottom” of his can of shaving cream, but also we learn how “the dispenser sputtered and sneezed a gob of white drool.” Meticulous description does not propel a plot (as anyone who reads Virginia Woolf well understands), but the heart of Harding’s book lies in this consistently lovely deluge of detail. We hear “the ring” of wood split in the freezing cold and see “the insides of the very tips of the waves” in an oil painting “illuminated by a sourceless light.” Harding’s dogged specificity never flags, and in the end it is this passionate attention to detail that makes “Tinkers” a riveting and perhaps enduring read.
More Intelligent Life: You started writing fiction after a career in music. Did you immediately experience it as a vocation or did it begin as a kind of hobby?
Paul Harding: I was pretty serious about it right out of the gate. I took a shot at writing a story, and went and did a summer class at Skidmore College. When I did that class, my teacher, by the luck of the draw, was Marilynne Robinson. She sort of sealed the deal for me that it would be a pretty cool life to be a writer. And I’d been an avid reader all of my life even though I was a musician. I was already very loyal to fiction writing as an art. So I took that class with Marilynne Robinson, determined I was going to get a master of fine arts. Wrote a couple more stories. The second and third stories I wrote I submitted to Iowa and luckily I got in. To this day, I’m grateful to Frank Conroy, who was then the director, for seeing something in the writing when it was still certainly very green...
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