From Expos to the Pulitzer

Ten years ago, Paul Harding was known as a talented, if demanding, Expos preceptor and erstwhile member of a rock band called Cold Water Flat. Back in town this week for a reading upon the release of his second book, “Enon,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning author bore little resemblance to his former self. Perched confidently behind a podium at the Harvard Coop, Harding said things like, “I write interrogative fiction, not declarative fiction,” and, “If each sentence is a revelation of its own little truth, than the joy you have in discovery is strong.”

Harding’s first novel, “Tinkers,” was rejected by most major editors, finally finding a publisher in a small non-profit called Bellevue Literary Press. The book gained followers slowly, quietly, as perhaps befitted its quiet, meditative tone. It was bereft of the kind of fireworks or “car crashes” publishers tend to look for in contemporary literature, as Harding told the New York Times. With Harding’s more Woolfian novel of consciousness decidedly out of style, the choice of “Tinkers” for the Pulitzer later that year led the Times to christen him as “Mr. Cinderella.”

After the Pulitzer, such skepticism dutifully withdrew; and while “Enon” is a different kind of a book than “Tinkers,” the excerpt Harding read at the Coop made clear that quiet contemplation continues to characterize his writing. As he sketched out the plot before beginning to read aloud, Harding explained, “Charlie’s already tenuous marriage to his wife dissolves, and he descends into an increasingly phantasmagoric realm of grief.” That is: Nothing much happens within a small New England town where nothing much ever tends to happen—which is to say, rather, that much of what happens takes place within Charlie’s own mind.

The audience, clustered at the front of the room with scattered latecomers settling in toward the back, seemed most interested in the intersection between Charlie’s mind and the author’s. The middle-aged and elderly outnumbered students by far; this was not Junot Diaz’s Harvard Bookstore talk of the week before. How autobiographical was the novel? one audience member asked. Harding cocked his head to the right, his eyes flitting upward as he replied, “I can’t ever really qualify it. I couldn’t be less interested in my own self; I couldn’t be more interested in the fact that I experience humanity as a self.” Harding grinned. “If that makes sense.”

The writer grew up in a Massachusetts town quite similar to Enon, and the North Shore in general, he said, is a “landscape [that] lays full claim to my imagination and my life.”

When asked if he was attempting to immortalize this kind of setting—the quaint small town where one stays where he or she grows up and that seems to be receding from American life—Harding objected that for him, the American landscape is still largely characterized by small towns and local cities. But he shrugged, then, saying, “I’m just provincial—by disposition and will.”

According to Harding, the settings he constructs are more of a backdrop than a plot device. A well-chiseled landscape, one with which he is already familiar, serves as a fully-formed backstage allowing him to concentrate on a story’s characters, on its dramatic tension. The main character of “Enon” is the “Tinkers” protagonist’s grandson; “One of my favorite effects to feel as a reader is recognition,” Harding said, citing Faulkner as a model.

As the audience members began to trickle out, the hour drawing to a close, the event seemed to become more akin to an old gathering among friends. “Nice to see so many familiar faces,” said Harding, smiling at a few in the crowd, those who asked most of the questions.

Harding ended by sketching out the single image, coming to him in a moment, that gave rise to the novel. He had glimpsed a silhouette of a hillside with gravestones beneath and a figure scampering across. Immediately, Harding knew it was Charlie Crosby, part of the “Tinkers” clan, sneaking home after a night of misadventure. “He was sneaking behind his daughter’s gravestone,” said Harding. “He was ashamed of the person he has become.” Harding fell silent just as a student, oblivious of the Pulitzer winner behind him, made a purchase to his left. The audience began to murmur and stand up to the ching of the cash register lingering among the shelves.