Book Club: Tinkers

In our daring attempt to make it through 30 years of Pulitzer Prize winners (and read other thoughtful, difficult books), esteemed book club member, Lisa suggest that Tinkers be the next book on our list. She also suggested it because it's been sitting on her nightstand for some time begging to be finished.

I just finished the book last night and still have mixed feelings about it. The cover of the book is a lone cross-country skier/alpine walker making his/her way across a snowy wasteland. The book opens "George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died." Do not fear. It is not as dreary as those things would make it seem. The story that follows jumps back and forth between George Washington Crosby and two stories of his father--one where he is a grown man with children and one where he is a young man whose father is going crazy. So we're following three stories and two men.

After finishing the book I read lots of reviews online and this one at The Guardian sort of sums up my feelings. In short, the prose is lovely (at times too lovely and obtuse), the supporting cast and details are incredible (there is a man who lives in the woods whom you are just going to love--he has dental problems...just like me) and the story just isn't that thrilling. The good news is, it was by far the cleanest and had the fewest (read: none that I remember) curse words of any of the Pulitzer Prize winners I have read to date.

Here's a sample of the incredible, thoughtful prose:

"My goodness, I am made from plants and wood, diamonds and orange peels, now and then, here and there; the iron in my blood was once the blade of a Roman plow; peel back my scalp and you will see my cranium covered in scrimshaw carved by an ancient sailor who never suspected that he was whittling at my skull--no, my blood is a Roman plow, my bones are being etched by men with names that mean sea wrestler and ocean rider and the pictures they are making are pictures of norther stars at different seasons...."

Some other thoughts.

Time: In The Guardian Post he references Faulkner and the idea that the past is never dead and never really past. In my quest to banish Po (my mean Chinese internal mother) the past is something that I've been thinking about. It's easy for me to look at the past and harshly judge the girl who did those things and was that way. This book was a lovely meditation because in it, the past isn't judged. A man goes to work and never comes home and moves to Chicago and starts a new life and no one in the book judges him. In fact, there isn't really any commentary on it. The past gets to exist without judgment. I'm working on that. On just letting the past exist--no judgments, only lessons I have been able to learn.

Voice and Narration: You're 2/3 of the way through the book before you hit a 1st person narrator. And it's George's father when he's a young boy and his dad is having a mental break down. It was a little jarring to me. The author also throws in Latin names ie. Homo Borealis (human light?--parenthetical my own) and really obscure stream-of-conscious ideas or stories. They didn't work for me at all.

Death: Death and mental breakdowns are almost treated as the same thing in the book. I'm still mulling this one over so I'll take any comments as to what people think.

What do you think? As I mentioned I only finished last night and if someone wants to make a claim that this is the best book every written I'll listen.

Next book, per Melissa's suggestion Little Bee.


You have one month--get cracking. From what I've read of it you should know that it is about a Nigerian refugee who changes to lives of a group of Brits.

And I wasn't kidding. I'd love comments on Tinkers because my brain is certainly still mulling it over.