Piece Description

In this hour with writing talents on the rise, the conversation begins with debut novelist Paul Harding:

What is the rock drummer thinking? Well, if he's the dazzling first-novelist Paul Harding of Tinkers, the guy at the drums in the band known as "Cold Water Flat" was channeling Elvin Jones, reinventing time with his own hands and feet on drumsticks and pedals. He was listening to hear how sound works, how the world works, how he works. Paul Harding [Gary Ottley photo]Paul Harding's prose in that moment can remind you of Marshall Dodge's old "Bert and I" Maine stories. It can also sound like music: "Tinker, tinker. Tin, tin, tin. Tintinnabulation. There was the ring of pots and buckets..." We hear light percussive sounds of a human voice, repetitions finding a rhythm. We hear a musician becoming a writer -- not a wild a leap, he observes in conversation.

Paul Harding is also a self-taught modern New England transcendentalist, out of the Thoreau and Emerson school, who read his way into an original inner life. Marilynne Robinson at the Iowa Writers Workshop eased his transition from the drums to the keyboard. He's read everything -- been touched by Henry James and Proust and Carlos Fuentes and Michael Ondatje, among others -- and he's taught writing at Harvard. Tinkers -- as in country peddlars between the 19th and early 20th centuries -- is an almost plotless novel, constructed as carefully as a clock, about fathers dying, thinking about their sons, and their fathers. It is a marvel on every page.

In the third part of the show, Chris talks with Israeli short-storyist Etgar Keret:

The writer Etgar Keret was our Open Source witness in Israel two years ago to a general (local, global, existential) disbelief and alienation from the war on Lebanon. And now we have the pleasure of meeting him in the flesh on a campus visit to Brown. Etgar Keret's bizarre, violent, popular short stories (in a collection The Girl on the Fridge) are cited as a register of Israel's consciousness, post-Intifada and post-peace process. Crowbar beatings, sledge-hammer murders and other grotesque happenings abound in these fictions. In one, a kids' party magician reaches into the hat and pulls out, first, a rabbit's bleeding severed head and, later, a dead baby. He concludes: "It's as if someone was trying to tell me this is no time to be a rabbit, or a baby. Or a magician." Keret's Israeli characters are caught in states of mind and spirit between love and suicide, between boredom and brutal anger.

In our conversation, Etgar Keret and I were both trying (and failing!) to remember the source of the notion that art, including fiction, is the layer of the human record (unlike the monuments of warfare and politics) that does not lie.