Thu Feb 09 2012
Prize-winning fiction offers a variety of rewards to the reader. This is literature, and these will be classics.
“Tinkers” by Paul Harding received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which is awarded for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life. The little book — 191 pages, but also small in the hand — presents the death-bed memories and imaginings of old George Washington Crosby, a fixer of clocks, mixed with scenes from the life of his father, Howard. In their own ways, George and Howard are both tinkers. But the author is also a tinker, only with words. Try reading this passage about Howard aloud: “He tinkered. Tin pots, wrought iron. Solder melted and cupped in a clay dam. Quicksilver patchwork. Occasionally, a pot hammered back flat, the tinkle of tin sibilant, tiny beneath the lid of the boreal forest. Tinkerbird, coppersmith, but mostly a brush and mop drummer.”
Harding writes in long, detailed sentences (up to a page and a half long) in even longer paragraphs. Reading his book is sometimes like dreaming, effortlessly conjuring the precise images laid out on the page. The author weaves between memories, scenes of domestic life, childhood reveries, and reflections on the human condition. It can even be funny. But mostly the language is lyrical, with instances that are absolutely prose poems: “What of miniature boats constructed of birch bark and fallen leaves, launched onto cold water clear as air? How many fleets were pushed out toward the middles of ponds or sent down autumn brooks, holding treasures of acorns, or black feathers, or a puzzled mantis? Let those grassy crafts be listed alongside the iron hulls that cleave the sea, for they are all improvisations built from the daydreams of men, and all will perish, whether from ocean siege or October breeze.”
There is very little plot, and sometimes he seems to be rambling. But then there’s this, and all is forgiven: “I would hear his voice and look across the water to the white of our house, just visible behind the line of trees, to where I knew his open window was inhaling and exhaling the plain white curtains my mother had insisted on in the name of minimal domestic propriety.” Whoa, mama! Give that man a Pulitzer Prize!
“Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel won not only the Man Booker Prize for the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland, but also the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. The 532-page historical novel is set in and around England’s Tudor court in the early 1500s. The saga of King Henry VIII is one of history’s more familiar stories, but here it’s told from a nontraditional perspective: It focuses on the usually caricatured Thomas Cromwell, who becomes a complex and sympathetic figure in the midst of a fully peopled court. (Luckily for us, the author has supplied a nice list of the many characters.) Cromwell is first shown as a child, being beaten by his bully father, then running away to be a sailor. We meet him again at the age of 40 and find that he has become a self-taught man. He has memorized the entire New Testament in Latin and “He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.”
It’s all about 16th-century politics, church vs. monarch, day-to-day court intrigue, and the growing relationship between Cromwell and the king. Sometimes the story is involving, and sometimes it’s dry. I liked the dialogue, but wasn’t always sure who was talking. The writing can be clever, as in the author’s description of the eyes of Anne Boleyn: “They are black eyes, … shiny like the beads of an abacus; they are shiny and always in motion, as she makes calculations of her own advantage.” It can also be insightful: “Maps are always last year’s. England is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground. They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move, and even the histories that trail us; the faces of the dead fade into other faces, as a spine of hills into the mist.”
For “The Lacuna,” Barbara Kingsolver won the Orange Prize for Fiction, which celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing around the world. The 507-page novel is presented as a biography of Harrison Shepherd, the son of an American father and a Mexican mother, told mostly through his journals, which he began in his boyhood in Mexico in 1929. The boy is chosen to mix plaster for Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, and he later works for Rivera and his wife, artist Frida Kahlo, as a cook and a typist. But the artists’ political leanings and associations will come back to haunt the adult Shepherd in the post-war United States, where he settles down as a successful writer of novels.
Even on the first page the writing is artistry, as the boy describes his mother: “Sometimes she ran down the tiled hallway to her son’s bedroom, appearing in the doorway with her hair loose, her feet like iced fish in the bed, pulling the crocheted bedspread tight as a web around the two of them, listening.” Kingsolver paints pictures just as Rivera and Kahlo do, but her images come from words, bold and colorful: “girls with red yarn braided into their hair and wound around their heads into thick crowns. Their white dresses swirled like froth, with skirts so wide they could take the hems in their fingertips and raise them up to make sudden wings, like butterflies, fluttering as they turned.” Her words form layers, the foreground filled with colorful images, then personal drama all around and, behind it all, a political, historical and even legendary backdrop.
Shepherd’s journals intersect with the flat, crisp writing of the archivist, along with dialogue, letters and newspaper clippings, and we are reminded that Kingsolver is a master of multiple voices, as in her “The Poisonwood Bible.” The lacuna, a mysterious hidden passage between one world and another, becomes a repeated metaphor. It’s a great, absorbing read, and the ending is absolutely wonderful. I had thought “The Poisonwood Bible” was Kingsolver’s masterpiece, yet here’s another one. Serendipity!
Copyright © 2010 Mary Louise Ruehr.
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BOOK NOTES, One for the Books Extra Online
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For best-seller lists and more book news, go to:
http://www.recordpub.com/news/article/4828398
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Here are links to other recent One for the Books columns. More links are available on my blog at http://blogs.dixcdn.com/shine_a_light/one-for-the-books/
Authors’ Lives, Real or Imagined -- http://www.recordpub.com/news/article/4856578
Memorable Characters -- http://www.recordpub.com/news/article/4822150
True-Life Adventure for Dad -- http://www.recordpub.com/news/article/4842039
Rainy Day Books for Children -- http://www.recordpub.com/news/article/4835050
Questions of Identity -- http://www.recordpub.com/news/article/4826618
Lives of Real Women -- http://www.recordpub.com/news/article/4817982
A Bit of Southern Hospitality -- http://www.recordpub.com/news/article/4813799
Marriage -- http://www.recordpub.com/news/article/4805797
Politicians Behaving Badly -- http://www.recordpub.com/news/article/4796121
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Thanks for reading One for the Books. Please let us know what kind of book news you’d like to see on this page. Send e-mail to Books@recordpub.com. Send other mail to Mary Louise Ruehr, Books Editor, Record-Courier, 126 N. Chestnut St. (P.O. Box 1201), Ravenna, OH 44266.
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