I picked him because his novel Tinkers won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure.
A methodical repairer of clocks, he is now finally released from the usual constraints of time and memory to rejoin his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler, whom he had lost 7 decades before. In his return to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Maine, he recovers a natural world that is at once indifferent to man and inseparable from him, menacing and awe inspiring.
Tinkers is about the legacy of consciousness and the porousness of identity from one generation the next. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, it is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.
1. He was born in 1967 and grew up in Wenham, Massachusetts.
2. His grandfather fixed clocks and Paul became his apprentice.
3. He earned his BA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
4. He was the drummer for the band Cold Water Flat from 1990-7.
5. He decided to become a writer while reading Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra.
6. He has taught writing at Harvard University and the University of Iowa.
7. His first novel (above) was published in 2009.
Have you read Tinkers?
