Tinkers won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It was the first novel published by a tiny press in NYC that operated out of the unlikely venue of Bellevue Hospital. So, it already does not fit the mold for a Pulitzer winner. But open its cover, and you are in for a literary treat.
I can count on one hand the books that I re-read, but I do so with this book every so often because it is rich in texture and meaning.
First line: “George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died.” It is a moving book that demands to be savored about what life all boils down to as the clock tick-tocks us out of its reach.
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.
The Meadow is a book that is far grander than its already grand setting of the American West.
Galvin explores the lives that have come and gone over a hundred years from a meadow at the confluence of two rivers. If you were teaching literature and had to give the best example of place, you could do no better than Galvin’s writing.
As a reader, I enjoy books whose lines make you want to go back and reread, just to savor the word craft and relish the imagery. The Meadow is a masterclass.
In discrete disclosures joined with the intricacy of a spider's web, James Galvin depicts the hundred-year history of a meadow in the arid mountains of the Colorado/Wyoming border. Galvin describes the seasons, the weather, the wildlife, and the few people who do not possess but are themselves possessed by this terrain. In so doing he reveals an experience that is part of our heritage and mythology. For Lyle, Ray, Clara, and App, the struggle to survive on an independent family ranch is a series of blameless failures and unacclaimed successes that illuminate the Western…
So much of modern writing requires mental acrobatics. It doesn’t engage the heart. But Lime Creek does just that. It is all heart and beautiful writing about the relationship between a father and his sons in the cowboy West that lingers into the modern world.
Joe Henry is a poet and songwriter who has written for the likes of John Denver and Frank Sinatra; he is a hermit who lives by a Colorado river, and his book Lime Creek is every bit as tender and profound as it should be.
In this wonderful work of fiction, Joe Henry explores the complex relationship between a father and his sons, whose deep connections to one another, to the land, and to the creatures that inhabit it give meaning to their lives.
Spencer Davis, his wife, Elizabeth, and their sons, Luke, Whitney, and Lonny, work with horses and with their hands. They spend long relentless days cutting summer hay and feeding it to their cattle through fierce Wyoming winters. The family bears witness to the cycle of life, bringing foals into the world and deciding when to let a favored mare pass on…
Boston artist Hazel Crichton inherits from her colorful grandmother a cottage in Scotland, where as a teenager, she spent a glorious summer. But Hazel is a mother now to five-year-old Aengus and living with her school teacher boyfriend, so she takes her family’s advice to simply sell the property.
Looking to rekindle old memories on a final visit, Hazel arrives at the cottage only to find Scottish poet Andrew Logan with a lease, he claims, from her grandmother. Martialing a lawyer, Hazel hunkers down with Aengus in the adjacent farm, hoping to outmaneuver Logan, but is slowly drawn in by this radical poet and his crazy scheme to steal back the Lewis Chessmen for Scotland from the British Museum in London.
