Every now and then a good book completely passes us by: we don’t get a copy, for whatever reason, and we don’t request one because the book’s not on our radar. That’s what happened with Paul Harding’s first novel, “Tinkers,” which was published at the beginning of 2009 by the Bellevue Literary Press, a small publisher that had only been in business for a couple of years. Now “Tinkers” has gone and won the Pulitzer Prize — the first novel from a small press to win that award since “A Confederacy of Dunces” did it for Louisiana State University Press in 1981.
I first heard of “Tinkers” nine months after it was published, when a judge for the Center for Fiction’s first-book award enthused about it to me. (It was a finalist, but it lost to John Pipkin’s “Woodsburner.”) But just because we missed the book doesn’t mean everybody did: it received glowing reviews from, among others, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker and The Boston Globe. From those I can tell you that “Tinkers” is the poetic account of a dying man’s last days and his relationship with his father. I was already planning to read it, but now I’m planning to read it sooner.
We did review both of the runners-up, by the way: Lydia Millet’s “Love in Infant Monkeys” and Daniyal Mueenuddin’s “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.”