Tinkers: Literary in the best and worst senses of the word

Yesterday started the hard-to-find "Tinkers" by Paul Harding, the surprise prize Pulitzer) winner. I really want to root for this being a great book - came from a minute literary publisher and almost no distribution or reviews to win the Pulitzer for fiction the only time the award has gone to a living author from a small press (JK Toole won for Confederacy - how nice to recognize someone after it's too late to do him any good in this world). Reviewers compared Harding with Updike and praised Tinkers as a true literary novel. Well, yes. It is literary - in the best and worst senses. Harding writes amazing scenes, amazing paragraphs, amazing sentences, in fact amazing words - why write "northern" when you can call it "boreal" for example. Readers/reviewers are I think always blown away by detailed descriptions of so-called manly things like hunting, fishing, building, carpentry - and Tinkers is just loaded with the arcana of home repair and construction, and in particular the repair of antique clocks. I'm impressed. But so far not moved. Story such as it is follows the last days of a 90ish retiree as he sinks toward death surrounded by family and memories, alternating with scenes of his grandfather, a peddler in n. new england in the 19th century and early 20th. Some tremendously imaginative scenes, no doubt - the opening in which the dying man imagines his house falling in on him as he sleeps, the grandfather's visit to maine hermit. These, however, for better or worse, are not scenes in the style of Updike who took the ordinary and found extraordinary angles and nuances; these are writerly scenes, very much in the style of Maryanne Robinson, who touts the book and was one of Harding's teachers - great writing that draws a lot of attention to itself. Hoping these great scenes begin to take shape as a story, as I continue with the book - and hoping that Harding will continue to develop his talent, which is abundant.