Tinkers

I'm giving this book 4 stars because it's obviously really well written, in almost prose-like fashion. I didn't love it, though. Admittedly, prose is lost on me. The only poet I really like is Billy Collins, and that's because he makes me laugh.

George Washington Crosby is on his deathbed, with his family keeping vigil seemingly around the clock. Clocks play a big role in this story, by the way. George was a clockmaker, and we get all kinds of lyrical descriptions of the inner workings of clocks. George's father, Howard, was a tinker by trade, and we learn, through flashbacks of sorts, not only about George's life but that of his father. Howard was an epileptic. When he finds out George's mother is planning to send him to an asylum, he leaves his family behind in Maine and sets off to start a new life in Philadelphia, never to see his family again except for one last meeting, 20 years later, when he shows up on George's doorstep on Christmas Day.

I had a hard time getting into the story. I'm not sure if it was the poetic descriptions or the lack of dialogue, but I felt like I was looking in on this story through slightly shaded curtains. Everything was a bit hazy. And it would jump from George's story to Howard's and was a little confusing for me at first too. (Later on he starts going back to HOWARD'S father, and I thought, oh, great, just when I was getting a grasp on which generation I was in...)

At times you think you're reading a brilliantly written, deeply insightful piece of work. But those times are rare and majority of the book reads like one big run-on sentence. Thankfully, it's a really short book or I don't think I would have been able to finish it.

Good book. The story of two men's lives. It follows them from childhood to death, only touching on the things that shape them into the men that they become. The two stories are intertwined and it's beautifully written; this years Pullitzer Prize for Fiction winner.

Elegant prose, I get. Storyline, not so much. I did enjoy this window into the imagined wanderings of a mind soon to leave the earth. And overall, the anecdotes and images hung together to frame up a life without huge regret, although the continuing image of the complexity of father/son relationships was clear. The language in this book was its most important feature to me. Things like:

...he fell into a sort of waking stupor in which his mind was as it is when a person sleeps but his dreams are composed by his open eyes.
or
The light, too, shattered like a vast plate and rejoined itself and splintered again, shards and chips and glowing glass and backlit wisps of it turning in hushed and peaceful exchange and saturating everything Howard saw...

clear, recognizable images