Back in the early 2000s, Paul Harding left the world of music, got an MFA from the Iowa writers’ Workshop, and wrote his first novel—Tinkers—about an itinerant Maine peddler in the 1800s. The book won the 2010 Pulitzer and launched Harding’s career as a university Prof, adding one more facet to his life.

 If you are a reader of great modern literary works, of course you will want to read Tinkers. The writing is gifted and it offers layers and layers of rich discoveries for any book club as well. In my club, we chased several interesting strings, including whether the book’s protagonist is George Washington Crosby (whose life and death bookends the text) or his father, Howard Aaron Crosby (with all his failures as a husband, father, poet, and backwoods salesman).

If you are a writer, you may be very interested in the wisdom Harding passes along to his students—no doubt at the same speed and volume that is caught on video in an hour and half interview on David Perell’s show, “How I Write.” The advice is really good stuff.

All of that interests me—as a writer, as a retired Prof—but what really caught my fancy is the meter of Harding’s prose, and his background as a jazz drummer in those years while working his way through his first college degree.

I have written before about my affinity to the “lilt” evident in many novels by Irish authors. In my own writing, I seem to have a subconscious desire to provide a certain throb to the sentences. And then of course, there’s the poet’s attention to metrical form. Harding’s musical background provides a similar feeling to his writing, based on the rhythm and improvisation of jazz.

At about the hour-and-15-minute mark in Perell’s interview, Harding admits that when he writes, he is aware of the number of “beats” in a sentence. There is variety to his writing of course. . .it is not the rigid measure of, say, poetry of the 1500s. But if you do not hurry through the pages of this short novel, the music will make itself known.

I remember noticing this passage: “Tinker, tinker. Tin, tin, tin. Tintinnabulation.” I could almost hear the snares on that one. In the Perell interview, Harding pointed out this longer passage, that he calls “a scat, a riff”:

He tinkered.
Tin pots, wrought iron.
Solder melted and cupped in a clay dam.
Quicksilver patchwork.
Occasionally, a pot hammered back flat,
the tinkle of tin sibilant,
tiny beneath the lid of the boreal forest.
Tinkerbird,
coppersmith,
but mostly a brush and mop drummer.

JONNIE MARTIN