Tinkers by Paul Harding / Review by John Self

 

PAUL HARDING: TINKERS

John Self

July 15, 2010

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is one of those awards that I follow but don’t often take heed of. For most of the Pulitzer winners I’ve read (such as Updike’s last two Rabbits, Eugenides’ Middlesex, Ford’s Independence Day), they’re books I would have read anyway. Those examples make me forever think that the Pulitzer is an award favouring big books, so this year’s winner is a double surprise: not just a debut novel, but a 185-page debut. (It won against Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, one of the best books I’ve read this year, so expectations were high.) I bought the US edition, but it was picked up in an expensive bidding round by Heinemann in the UK, and has just been published here.

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout review – the return of Lucy Barton

Booker prize / Alan Garner becomes oldest author to be shortlisted

My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout review / Powerful storytelling

In the third book in the series, the emotional panorama of a long relationship is beautifully observed as Lucy reconnects with her ex-husband

Wednesday 20 October 2021

The most unlikely thing about Lucy Barton, previously seen in Elizabeth Strout’s novels My Name Is Lucy Barton and Anything Is Possible, is how much she loves New York, where she has lived for decades. Returning to the city by plane in Oh William!, she looks out of the window and feels “what I have almost always felt when I have flown into New York, and that was a sense of awe and gratitude that this huge, sprawling place had taken me in”. Yet the Amgash series that Oh William! belongs to is named after the small Illinois farm town where Lucy grew up in “terribly bleak poverty” with harsh and sometimes abusive parents. That’s how hard it is – impossible, really – to shake off your roots. “I have never fully understood the whole class business in America,” Lucy observes, a blind spot she shares with much of the nation, although she blames it on coming “from the very bottom of it, and when that happens it never really leaves you”. Most people think of New York as a challenging place to live, but as far as the gentle, easily frightened Lucy is concerned, the Big Apple has nothing on Amgash.