TINKERS by Paul Harding ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This is my third Pulitzer Prize-winning read in a year and damn does the prose always hit. It could be endless passages of descriptions or musings about a character’s past, I don’t care. The writing is next level and mind-bogglingly human to its core. The kind of writing that makes you think seriously about a time and a life you never have before, like how hard it must’ve been to be a tinker with epilepsy selling wares out of a horse wagon in the early 1900s.

It’s hard to distill books this deep into simple themes, and I often wonder as I’m reading them how I could possibly review it when the writing sort of speaks for itself. But here’s what I found:

Both main characters are Tinkers in their own way. A father that travels with supplies for those living in the backwoods of New England; a son that works with the tiny mechanics of clocks and watches. Both men experience little deaths of all kinds as their stories are told in retrospect. There’s much to ponder here about the lives we lead on our way to that grand finish line. How at times we appear to be living out a pre-arranged script, not wanting to unbalance the air in the room by daring to exist naturally in a truth not often allowed to escape our routines and obedience. We are left at the end to think back to these moments and paste them together into something coherent and purposeful, deciding if it was what we wanted, if all the choices and mistakes and heartbreaks were worth it, and if maybe none of it mattered anyway. Maybe we never really had a choice.

It’s also about fathers and sons and how much we really know the ones that raise us. It’s hard (near impossible) to see our parents as real people with their own thoughts and ideas and histories and pain. A never-ending chain that dates back forever of men trying to be men, whatever the hell that means, raising sons and daughters and doing their best not to turn them into themselves. I know the struggle of both fathers on the page here, understanding their own imperfection, trying to avoid transmitting it to their kids. Sometimes I feel it’s inevitable, despite our best efforts. I often wonder how much my daughter will really KNOW me when she’s older, and how I can relay to her that I’m just some guy who tried his best, not much more than that. I imagine most of parenting (and maybe being a person in general, minus a few assholes out there) can be boiled down to that.

This was a snapshot of two men intertwined by blood and that inevitable, slow march from birth to death. Each of them filling that time how they see fit, for better or worse. I’m glad I filled some of mine with their story. I recommend you do the same.