my rage over this novel has grown over timeAt some point, I will learn to stop scouring the Pulitzer finalists lists for books to read, because it always ends up exactly the same way. Always.::: Plot :::The, er, plot of Paul Harding's Tinkers is fairly simple, and easily spoiled. A man, George Crosby, who fixed clocks, is dying. On his death bed, surrounded by family, he reflects back on his life, and somehow, on that of his father, Howard, a tinker (or traveling backwoods salesman) who suffered from epilepsy.::: Why It Took Me So Long To Read This :::All during my trek through the combined bodice-ripping works of J.R. Ward, I was taking breaks and reading Tinkers. And after the last Ward book was finished, I was still reading Tinkers. For days.This book is Harding's debut novel, and won the Pulitzer. When I read the reviews on Amazon bashing it, I had no idea why people were so angry, but I understand it much better now; Harding's novel is just that hard to read.I'll admit that I hate novels that are very stylized, and Tinkers definitely falls in that category. It shifts between third person and first person narration. It ignores basic punctuation like quotation marks that would let you know a person was speaking or even thinking. But what makes Tinkers so very hard to read is the stream-of-consciousness style that focuses on every single detail to the extreme, and most of the time, using awkward phrasing. An example:"When the head's mouth opened, almost before the fish had even broken the surface of the stream, it made a hole, into which the dark water smoothly flowed."It's the type of pretty prose that MFA programs lust over but readers struggle with, and I'll be honest; I'd rather read a decently written mediocre book than a difficult-to-read excellent book. Tinkers may have a lot to say about the relationship between fathers and sons, and about the time before death, but it's so lost in the weeds that I think I missed it.This review originally published on Epinions way back when. Possibly the year after it won? The year it won? I originally rated it three stars, but over time, every time someone asks me what book I hated the most, it's this book.The stylization is so "Guy in your MFA program" it will make you want to throw things. It shrieks "THIS IS LITERARY FICTION" with all the subtlety of neon lights in an adult book store. And it makes me angry, all these years later, that I sacrificed so much precious reading time trying to slog through it to get to whatever point it was trying to make.There are fantastic literary fiction writers out there who aren't so dang precious about their writing (George Saunders, if you want a white dude). This definitely ain't it.0
跳至主要内容
复制链接
编辑
删除
