Tinkers

I found this short work of fiction to be an almost unbearable chore to plow through. While Harding certainly possesses a poetic tongue, I found his prose to be vastly overblown and his style unnecessarily complex. There were numerous sentences in this novel that seemed to go on for days. One sentence, for example, stretched from page 180 to page 183 . This textbook example of high “fog count” enjoys the simplifying benefit of just one solitary semicolon and included a number of commonly used terms such as: vastation, scurf, and intaglio. Harding's frequent changes of tense and perspective were so jarring as to necessitate the use of Dramamine. Many reviewers found the novelty of Harding's “rule breaking” to be a strongly positive aspect of this award-winning work. Needless-to-say, I do not share this view. I started this book with great anticipation and I do wish I could have joined the many Goodreads reviewers who so enjoyed this work (as well the Pulitzer selection committee) and given this work high marks but, alas, to do so would be, at best, seriously disingenuous, and, at worst, wholly dishonest.