A novel that's more like a poem, open and ambiguous : Tinkers

In part 3 of "Tinkers" Paul Harding takes us back another generation, as Howard Crosby recollects his grandfather, a country preacher. The preacher apparently was devoting more and more time to his writing and less to his actual sermonizing. In what seems to be a sample of his writing (Harding makes you work hard to figure out who's the subject in the many small sections of this intricate book, and he shifts freely from 3rd to 1st-person narrative), the preacher (or Harding) seems deeply influenced by Whitman's style - not sure if we're meant to take his writing seriously of if it's over-the-top pomposity. The congregation apparently believes that the preacher is losing his sanity, and, with aid of his wife, the elders of the congregation take him away from his family - leaving the young Howard Crosby distraught. Howard goes off an spends an entire night half-submerged in a pond, where among other things he observes an Indian hunter guide sit in the water and swallow a trout whole. The line between delusion and reality is continuously blurred in Tinkers, and you can see its ancestry in Marilynne Robinson, John Hawkes, and most specifically Faulkner - the Bear seems a seminal work for Harding, particularly in Part 3. The theme of a father's insanity, his isolation from the family, and its effect on a young son is now a dominant motif in the book - yet we have no idea how this shaped the life and character of the ostensible protagonist, George Cosby, whose dying days dominated the first part of the novel and are now pushed into the background. There's a lot of material here and, drawing toward the close, I'm still not sure how Harding will shape it - or if it even needs a shape. This novel in some ways may be more like a poem - open and ambiguous.