Excerpt of Tinkers by Paul Harding

Last month Paul Harding was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for “Tinkers,” the first time in decades that a small press snagged the prize. I got to see Harding at the LA Festival of Books, and was impressed by his wit and gravity. So I bought his book and enjoyed it immensely. It’s the type of book that repays re-reading — I’m still confounded by the notion of epilepsy as a kind of spiritual opening into another realm.

In this excerpt, Kathleen, married to Howard, watches a sunset. That kind of banal description — ‘watches a sunset’ — might put you off from the actual poetic performance, but don’t let it:

“The sun was going down. It sank into the stand of beech trees beyond the back lot, lighting their tops, so that their bare arterial branches turned to a netting of black vessels around brains made of light. The trees lolled under the weight of those luminescent organs growing at the tops of their slender trunks. The brains murmured among themselves. They kept counsel and possessed a wintery wisdom — cold scarlet and opaline minds, brief and burnished, flaring in the metallic blue of dusk. Then they were gone. The light drained from the sky and the trees and funneled to a point on the western horizon, where it seemed to be swallowed by the earth. The branches of the trees were darknesses over the lesser dark of dusk. Kathleen thought, That is like Howard’s brain — lit and used up and then dark. Lit too brightly. How much light does the mind need? Have use for? Like a room full of lamps. Like a brain full of light.”

Tell me that’s not the best description of a sunset you’ve ever read. Not only that, but it’s not description for the sake of description, but description as an analogy for the mental state of a character, therefore pushing the story and characterization along.