Suss: another literary journal

Tinkers is the story of George Crosby’s final week (and a day) of life. It is also the story of his father’s life. And his father’s life as well. And gen­er­ally of fam­i­lies. And rea­son­able horol­o­gists and their rea­son­ably tick­ing clocks. It also con­tains at least one com­plete cat­a­log of house­hold items, an assort­ment of early 19^th cen­tury Maine farm ani­mals, dis­ap­pear­ing American Indian hunt­ing guides, a tat­tered bear rug that is treated as a bemus­ing fam­ily mem­ber, a funeral pyre for a field mouse, pas­toral vignettes rem­i­nis­cent of both Edward Hoagland and Thoreau, an epilep­tic poet and his lyri­cal prose, a father who exists only in “brief dis­tur­bances of shadow and light,” sen­tence upon beau­ti­ful sen­tence longer than this review, and so much more. All in a novel just shy of 200 pages.

While like Whitman, Tinkers does con­tain mul­ti­tudes, it does not pos­sess much by way of tra­di­tional plot. It is a med­i­ta­tion on life and time. It is the deathbed men­tal dis­man­tling of a life and the lives that led to it; it is a skilled second-generation tin­ker tak­ing his 80 years apart in hopes that it all might be put back together again in some work­ing order. “The won­der of any­thing was that it was made in the first place,” George’s father, Howard, tells us in what may be a mem­ory. “What per­sists beyond this cat­a­clysm of mak­ing and unmaking?”

I say it may be a mem­ory, because the third per­son nar­ra­tion jumps, like Billy Pilgrim, ran­domly through time. And occa­sion­ally moves to both first and sec­ond per­son. And incor­po­rates the lan­guage and rhythms of antecedent eras and out­side texts (includ­ing the wholly fic­tion­al­ized and won­der­ful 1783 Reasonable Horologist pam­phlet by the Rev. Kenner Davenport). Yet the parts mak­ing up these parts—Paul Harding’s words hold­ing this story in place—are mas­ter­ful. It becomes evi­dent early in these pages that Tinkers is a finely crafted matrix of inter-working parts that add to some­thing truly remarkable.