Ditto the 2008 winner, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz.

 

I did read the 2007 winner — The Road, by Cormac McCarthy — but I read it in 2009.

 

Geraldine Brooks, who won for March in 2006, lived down the street from me in a small town in Virginia. Apologies, I still haven’t read it.

 

Nor have I read the 2005 winner —Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson — or the 2004 winner, The Known World, by Edward P. Jones, or the 2003 winner, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.

 

I could say I’m just not very good at recognizing and responding literary excellence. But that’s not it. I’m crazed for excellence — it’s “literary” that gives me a problem.

 

I’m not, as regular readers surely know by now, a fan of good writing for its own sake. I’m glad it happens. And I wish — if only for the children of literary writers — there were more readers who love delicious language, inspired imagery, and the graceful progression of words on a page.

 

But my thing is story and character. Set people in conflict, keep the plot moving, and I’m yours. Yes, it’s what looked for when I was eight years old, reading with a flashlight under the covers after my parents thought I was asleep. Despite my expensive education, it’s what I still look for — my grail is the addictive page-turner, the book you can’t put down. Maugham.  De Maupassant. Peter Temple. Jean Rhys. James Cain. Philip Roth. Muriel Spark. Alan Furst. Hemingway.J.M. Coetzee.

 

But I was curious about the 2010 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, Tinkers, by Paul Harding. For one thing, it’s short: 191 smallish pages. And cheap: $8.22 at Amazon.com for the paperback or the Kindle edition. Harding used to be a musician — drummer for a rock group called Cold Water Flat — and I fancied he could still keep a beat.

 

And then there’s the back story. (The New York Times — which did not review the book — has a good piece on this.) Rejection, rejection, rejection. Then a $1,000 advance from a tiny publisher. Champions appear. One gets the novel to a Pulitzer judge. Which leads to its unlikely win. And a cascade of happy announcements: a two-book deal with Random House (signed months before Harding won the Pulitzer) and a Guggenheim fellowship.

 

 

 

 

 

Which is not to say the book swirls in an interior monologue worthy of Joyce. Harding is actually quite brisk about revealing facts and character:

 

He got a master’s degree in education, counseled guidance in high school, went back north every summer to fly-fish with his poker buddies — doctors, cops, music teachers — bought a broken clock at a tag sale and a reprint of an eighteenth-century manual on how to fix it, retired, went on group tours to Asia, to Europe, to Africa, fixed clocks for thirty years, spoiled his grandkids, got Parkinson’s, got diabetes, got cancer, and was laid out in a hospital bed in the middle of his living room.

 

But look how that paragraph starts:

 

One hundred and sixty-eight hours before he died, he sneaked into the basement window of the West Cove Methodist Church and rang the bell on Halloween night. He waited in the basement for his father to whip him for doing it. His father laughed so hard and slapped his own thigh, because George had stuffed the seat of his pants with old Saturday Evening Posts.

 

George’s father Howard is a looming figure in these pages, and his character takes us back to 19^th Century New England. Howard is the “tinker” of the title — he was an old-fashioned peddler and repairman who traveled through Maine by wagon. That setting and that time produce great stories and minor players; it’s a pleasure to read any given page.

 

The bad news: Harding’s metaphors are an annoyance. George repaired clocks for a living; now he’s at the mercy of diseases that take him swirling chaotically through time.

 

The good news: In a book this short, nothing lasts long.

 

The better news: This short novel, though small, packs a considerable wallop.