Review by New York Times Review
TRULY MEMORABLE EXPERIENCES - whether they involve a lover, a pinot noir or a novel so good you have to keep putting it down just to savor the afterimage of a particular phrase - tend to generate a certain anticipatory tension. Will the follow-up repeat the magic? Or will the lover be distracted the next time around, the wine underwhelming? When it comes to Paul Harding's second novel, "Enon," the sin of harboring high expectations is both foreordained and forgivable; it's the tax on talent. How good was Harding's debut, "Tinkers"? One might have to go as far back as Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping" to find a first novel that declared itself with such authority. Harding's associative flights - his twisting, turning lyricism - were stunning, his ability to stress the physical world into extended metaphor downright Melvillean. This was prose that could lead 10,000 M.F.A. students to ruin. In "Enon," Harding's gifts are again everywhere on display. A forest path is "lined with wet, soggy leaves that felt like vellum ... up from the pagelike, pulpy folds of which little white moths innocently spun into the wrong season with nearly every step." The brass sphere representing the sun in the center of an orrery (a mechanical model of the solar system) is "so polished and reflective it not only threw the room's light back out, as if generating the glow itself, but also seemed to possess depth, as if one might be able to plunge into its fish-eyed fathoms, into another brassy room." This is beautiful work. So has lightning struck twice? Alas, no. The problem is that while the decentered story in "Tinkers" (which follows George Washington Crosby's thoughts as he lies dying) invited Harding's irrepressible attention to wander, "Enon" demands a closer focus because of the terrible sun at its center: the accidental death of the 13-year-old daughter of George's grandson Charlie Crosby. This should force certain adjustments; the gravity of grief makes anything that escapes its pull - metaphysical ponderings, whimsical asides, stunning prose - instantly suspect. A mother might notice a chip in the molding as she's told of her son's death (and we recognize this as the mind's defense against the unacceptable), but if she continues to notice, or imagines in detail the life of the carpenter who built the house, something's wrong. Grief militates against seeing. Charlie, however, sees everything. He speculates, digresses. Only hours after his daughter's death, he considers the mortician's "charcoal gray suit" and "close- cropped, receding hair," and confesses he's "embarrassed to call him Rick" because "the family had always referred to him as Ricky." Picking out the T-shirt his daughter is to be cremated in, he thinks to check if it has an "inappropriate design," then wonders: "What could be inappropriate, though? ... What's appropriate? Who at the funeral parlor's going to undress and dress her? Rick? Some guy in a rubber smock and gloves? There might well be health codes or laws about what clothes people can be cremated in. ... Who, I thought, is going to trundle my daughter into the fire?" If Charlie's voice seems a bit too alert under the circumstances - what minute in a man's life could match the somnam-bulistic horror of having to choose clothes for his daughter's cremation? - it's because, channeling his creator's gifts, he's unsuited to the task at hand. Speaking his pain, he misses the feeling of it. Embroidering on everything he sees, he undercuts our belief with every stitch. The grammar of silence is unfamiliar to him. The result, unfortunately, can be jarring. Invaded the night before the funeral by his Keilloresque in-laws, "gigantic Finns from Minnesota" who "skied and biked and hiked together," Charlie gives us their relative heights to the inch, grouses about their "intimidatingly good physical and moral health," then describes how the sisters, who look "like Olympic athletes," trap his grieving wife between them and begin going through pictures of the dead child. "Look at this one, Susie. She's so cute in this canoe Look at the face she's making here. Jesus, she looked just like you." Recounted with weird relish, the scene leaves a reader smiling queasily, attempting to correlate this relative blitheness on the eve of a daughter's funeral with any known expression of grief. When Charlie's wife abandons him to return to her family shortly after the funeral, he is left alone in the tiny New England town of Enon, self-medicating with painkillers and whiskey. From here until his tentative recovery a year later, he narrates his descent into unwashed, drugaddled madness, sounding at times like a physics professor (trying "to demonstrate the calculus of grief ... I drew mandalas and particle accelerators and calendars made up of concentric moving circles and ox-turn algorithms"), at others like an articulate kid holding out for the bell: "The woods of Enon," he tells us, are full of "the bones of animals and citizens: sheep and dogs, fathers and brothers, oxen and horses, mothers and aunts, pigs and chickens, sons and daughters, anonymous cats and owls, Puritans and Indians and unnamed infants." What's missing here is the unfathomable pain of a daughter's voice, the memory of her face. Drifting from the metaphysical ("What colloidal smudge shivered and convulsed at the charge for an instant?") to the weirdly macabre (making coffee, he contemplates ingesting his daughter's ashes) to the distant or flat-out disingenuous ("My woes were minuscule ... presumptuous,... I pretended to absolute tragedy"), Charlie arrives at a Walpurgisnacht scene in a graveyard featuring a giant, machinelike creature rising from the earth "made from the gut-strung skulls of tens of thousands of rodents, draped over horses' skulls that have been fused onto the delicate skeletons of human infants," and a chorus of ghouls who say things like "Huzzah!" and "That's right; chuck your girl into the furnace, palooka," and, in a stunningly cruel finale, Charlie's dead daughter, who rises before her helpless father's eyes from the skeleton-machine strapped to a kind of scaffold wearing a costume "of silk brocade and lace, douppioni and zibeline," jerks and twitches, puppetlike, and is then "enshrined in fire." "Mercy, mercy me; this is sad," Charlie gasps, exhorting himself to snap out of it and get his act together. And so he does, surfacing to a realization that suggests the heartbreaking novel of a father's grief that "Enon" might have been. "I try to tell her ... I miss her so much, every single day, everywhere, all the time, and that I love her so much, and this is all a dream," Charlie says, recognizing that these moments of consolation will continue "until I, too, simply cease and there isn't a soul left in Enon or anywhere else on this awful miracle of a planet to remember either of us." And just like that, we're back in the presence of Harding's gift, a talent one hopes to see returned to its natural, unconstrained and thrilling orbit. What could match the horror of having to choose clothes for your daughter's cremation? MARK SLOUKA'S new novel is "Brewster."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 6, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Harding, a writer preternaturally attuned to the spiraling of time and consciousness, continues the Crosby family story begun in his Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel, Tinkers (2009). Charlie was a solitary boy resistant to the confines of school, ecstatic in nature, and happy in the company of his clock-restorer grandfather, George Crosby. As a husband and father, Charlie loves to read, walk along the Enon River, study the long history of his Massachusetts village, and, best of all, share his passions with his receptive young daughter, Kate. Now all is lost in the shocking tragedy that propels this surreal, apocalyptic odyssey of grief. Writing with ferocious lyricism and macabre vision, Harding lures us deep into Charlie's memory and dreams, pain and desolation. Over a full cycle of New England seasons, Charlie, afflicted with the self-imposed stigmata of a broken hand and adrift in opiate-induced altered states, descends into squalor, inept criminality, and the terrors of the underworld, enacting his own private dire rituals of mortification and sorrow. Harding's mythic sensibility, soaring empathy for his devastated yet life-loving protagonist, comedic embrace of the absurd, and exquisite receptivity to the beauty and treachery of the living world make for one astonishingly daring, gripping, and darkly resplendent novel of all-out grief and crawling-from-the-ruins survival.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Drawing upon the same New England landscape and family as his Pulitzer Prize-winning debut Tinkers, Harding deftly captures loss and its consequences in this gorgeous and haunting follow-up. The novel opens with a grieving Charlie Crosby (grandson of Tinkers protagonist George Washington Crosby) attempting to come to terms with the death of his daughter, Kate, and the subsequent dissolution of his marriage. Although the narrative is rendered through Charlie's voice, the phenomenal prose on which Harding has staked his name comes out authentically, especially in the book's darkest and most introspective moments: "I felt like a ghost, listless and confined, wandering in a house that had been mine a century ago, relegated to examining the details of the lives of strangers." While the novel's first half is mired in the cyclical self-obsession and self-hatred of grief, and slows to a crawl for a few too many flashbacks, Charlie's eventual substance abuse and resulting hallucinations allow Harding to let his prose loose as he delves into the deepest aspects of loss and regret. Offering an elegiac portrait of a severed family and the town of Enon itself, Harding's second novel again proves he's a contemporary master and one of our most important writers. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (Sept. 10) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Novelist Harding's literary debut, Tinkers, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, introduced the world to a New England clockmaker named George Washington Crosby. This second novel continues the family story through George's grandson, Charlie Crosby, a man tumbling into a downward spiral of drug abuse and depression following the death of his daughter. Charlie turns his trauma inward to preserve both the memory of his daughter and the town of Enon in which he was born and raised. The narrative is a bridge between these intertwined but disparate experiences. While Charlie paints a bucolic portrait of Enon in his mind, his body and overall appearance wither away. Eventually, his memories and drug-induced imagination conjure up his daughter's ghost, and the faculties of imagination and memory are presented as potentially harmful, leading to prolonged and intensified suffering. The reader is left to ponder whether grief is best remedied by hanging onto the memories of the past or by moving forward without them. VERDICT With crisp, descriptive language, Harding continues where his previous novel left off, exploring the complexity of family and mortality. [See Prepub Alert, 3/18/13.]-Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The author of the Pulitzer Prizewinning Tinkers (2009) returns with another striking study of family, time and mortality. This time, though, Harding's style is less knotty, almost Hemingway-esque, at least in its opening pages. That's in part due to the fact that he has a clearer story to tell: This book covers a year in the life of Charlie Crosby (a descendant of the clan introduced in Tinkers) as he mourns the death of his 13-year-old daughter in an accident. After smashing his hand against a wall in a rage, he loses his wife and develops a slow-growing addiction to painkillers and alcohol that leads him to break-ins and other foolhardy decisions. But Harding is less concerned with plot as with what's swimming in Charlie's head, and themes of nature and time abound. His narration shifts from past to present, from memories of his daughter to his nature walks in New England to his helping his father repair a clock in a home that has an orrery--a model of the solar system that symbolizes the symphonic breadth of nature and the universality of his struggle. Harding's work owes much to his former teacher Marilynne Robinson, with whom he shares an affinity for precise, religious-tinged prose. The penultimate chapters of the book, however, display a unique hallucinatory style: As Charlie's grief reaches its apex, he's consumed by dark visions, and Harding's skillful whipsawing of the reader from the surreal to the quotidian is the best writing he's done. Though the final pages bend the story safely back to a familiar redemption arc, Charlie's experience doesn't feel commonplace. His trip to hell and back envisions a different kind of hell, and his status as "back," just as in the real world, isn't guaranteed. Beautifully turned: Harding has defogged his style a bit and gained a stronger emotional impact from it.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
