Tinkers is Paul Harding’s first novel. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2010. It garnered gushing praise from the New Yorker, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many others. Accolade and awards alone don’t necessarily make a book stand out, however. I believe that reading is subjective—and situational. Subjective, because every reader brings something unique to the interpretation of a novel. Your own life experiences can help you identify with a protagonist, sympathize with an antagonist, or, conversely, find nothing to grip you, nothing to draw you into the author’s concocted world. And situational, because where you are, what you’re doing, and how you’re feeling has a direct impact on what a book can do for you—for better or worse. Take Life of Pi, for example. By all rights, it’s an extraordinary book. It won awards, it was a darling of literary critics. It’s been made into a feature film. And yet, I couldn’t finish the thing. My memory of the book—admittedly sketchy now—was something along the lines of “it’s dull, uninteresting, and I don’t want to bother finishing it.” Does this say something about its author? Maybe. But more likely, it says something about me—the Reader—and about where my mind was at the time. So in reading, the onus for enjoyment is not only on the author, it’s also on the reader.

With all that said, Tinkers is a story with few elements I can readily identify with. It has a father/son theme. I have a father. I have a son. Okay, good so far. One of its main characters—George Washington Crosby—is dying in the “present” of the novel. I’ve never died myself, but I have been around death. Close enough. But the rest—a New England childhood and adulthood around backwoods homesteaders and small villages, clock repair, epilepsy—I have no connection to whatsoever. And yet, Tinkers, despite being incredibly slow moving at times, was a novel that gripped me tightly from page one to the final period. It’s a remarkable piece of writing, full of intensely detailed descriptions not only of place and sensory experiences, but also of thoughts and emotions. And it’s all non-linear. Essentially, the entire story takes place in Crosby’s home as he lives out his final moments on a hospital bed in his living room, the dining room table shoved to one side to make room for his deathbed. His family surrounds him, but he interacts with them very little. Through his drifting, tangential memories, we see his own childhood, the story of his father’s tumultuous and poignant life, and even his father’s father. The leaps from past to present to hallucination to imagined or not passages read aloud from a book are dreamlike, ethereal. You don’t really notice these changes when they come and go. The structure of the book is surprisingly complex, but in reading it, I never felt confused nor struggled to figure out what was going on, it was just a full immersion in someone else’s mind, and the really incredible thing is, that mind was not the author’s, it was his character’s.