Before I begin this review, I'd like to acknowledge that I am almost certainly wrong. A book that has won so many plaudits, including the Pulitzer Prize, must be a great book. Readers more intelligent than me will probably consider me a philistine or a fool, most likely both. However, my mixed reaction to reading Tinkers is at odds with the universal praise that has been heaped on this short novel.
Let's start with the overwhelming positive - there are many parts of the book for which the prose is beautiful, really beautiful, with a texture that few writers can match. From the lightness of touch in Howard's daily appreciation of nature to the visceral description of the epileptic fit on Christmas day; for these passages alone it is worth reading the book.
My main gripe with this book is that, in places, it feels incredibly `loose'. For every beautiful passage there is another which only confuses. In these it feels as if the book has been written with the primary aim of being poetic, rather than communicating a message to the reader. Whilst not in itself the worst of literary crimes, for a book to be truly great it should do both, preferably achieving the latter with skilful use of the former. Too often it feels like a collection of well written exercises, without sufficient glue to hold them together as a single novel. At its worst it felt unstructured and, well, a bit messy. Perhaps I'm a bit dim, but most of the themes didn't work for me, and I can't help feel that a couple of steps away from poetry and towards fiction would make the book more complete without diminishing any of the beauty.
The book's eulogisers have a number of defences from which they can counter my concerns; it is a book about a hallucinating dying man; poetic licence; that the lack of exactitude is a metaphor for death itself; etc etc. However, all of these fail to pass muster. Similarly poetic books manage to feel tighter, with more direct themes, more meaning and a more complete finished article than this (`The Quickening Maze' by Adam Foulds and `The Sea' by John Banville are two that come to mind).
In conclusion, the line between genius and the emperor's new clothes is a fine one, but the ability to only write beautiful prose does not necessarily mean the book is a masterpiece.