I’ve been reading Tinkers by Paul Harding because I enjoyed listening to him speak about his writing process, but his writing style has somewhat disappointed me.

One of the many vignettes in his book begins with this modest sentence:

Ninety-six hours before he died, George said he wanted a shave.

This is a good sentence and, in a sense, a perfect sentence. It has no flaws. It does its job and nothing else. It states two facts in plain terms and allows all meaning to arise from their juxtaposition, the irony of personal grooming at the edge of personal oblivion.

We learn that, for all his adult life, George kept a daily habit of shaving to stave off his beard of mangy patches. (Supposedly, only a day’s stubble lent him the look of an invalid or a large child incapable of taking care of his own needs.) But in his dotage and ill health, George’s shaving routine has faltered. So he asks his family if they might shave him, and one of his adult grandchildren, Sam, volunteers.

Harding gives details like the bowl of scalding water and the cheap disposable plastic razor that are relevant and meaningful because they foreshadow Sam’s carelessness and invoke us readers to sympathize with George. But Harding also includes details that seem irrelevant and consequently dilute and distract from the meaningful ones. He mentions that the razor was found by the grandmother in a basket beneath the bathroom sink that was filled with various disused, soap-crusted toiletry. I think soap-crusted is the most excessive detail here, but I think the entire phrase could have been removed. Harding is giving us too much. Only to a certain extent do vivid descriptions make things more vivid to the reader. At some point, they stop deepening the feeling of immersion in a fictional world and start drawing attention instead to the author and his stylishness as a writer.

We readers have already a reservoir of vivid images we draw from when reading fiction. It is enough to say that the grandmother found a razor in her own house. That alone can conjure an image of a bathroom cupboard full of nonessential toiletry. And even if it does not, it conveys the relevant facts. Firstly, that George’s usual shaving equipment will not be used. And secondly, that for some bothersome reason George’s wife does not know where that equipment is or has neglected to find it. These subtle, meaningful implications are more salient to readers when the author does not distract them with other, irrelevant information.

Fiction is a collaboration between author and audience. Readers experience the same work differently, sometimes drastically so. The same reader returning a work encounters it with new eyes. To write with restraint is to withhold one’s creative surplus to make space for the reader’s reflections and ruminations. Every word, every detail the author provides is an invitation to the reader to consider something and therefore also a dismissal of their considerations. Detail and specificity become eventual enemies of depth and expanse.

A few sentences later in Tinkers comes another example of overwriting:

The can [of shaving cream] was old, excavated along with the razor from the guts of the cabinet under the bathroom sink.

The word excavated is a needlessly stylish alternative to the typical and sufficient “dug up.” Even a simple “taken” would’ve served. More indulgent than excavated is guts, which is an empty metaphor for “inside.” It suggests a deeper meaning that is not there. In indulgent moments like these, the quality of the novel degrades from vivid to lurid. (In context of the whole book, this particular choice of guts suffers further from the fact that Harding had already used it metaphorically twice when referring to the internals of clocks and goes on to use it in such a way another three times. It’s an evocative description but Harding washes it out with overuse.)

It’s not a sin to flex your muscles as a writer if you do so by building something compelling. But I think Harding succumbs to the temptation of making pointless flourishes and embellisments all too often, especially for a novel that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.