FICTION
This Other Eden
Paul Harding
Heinemann, $32.99

Paul Harding has published three short books in 15 years. He chooses his words with exquisite care. He richly rewards anyone who allows him to set the pace, focusing our attention on nooks and crannies of experience that are luminous because they simply exist. Even more than Marilynne Robinson, his one-time teacher, he casts a spell that brings the reader to stillness.

Harding’s first book, Tinkers (2009), won the Pulitzer Prize. There is a scene in it that has never left my imagination. The novel captures the last eight days in the life of George Washington Crosby as he lies in bed and meditates upon the world he is leaving and his ephemeral part in it. Crosby has been a watchmaker. The wheels and cogs in his world are small.

He thinks of his father, Howard, who was a tinker and suffered epilepsy; he was part of a scarcely visible community, the rural poor of Maine, scraping a living from the austere countryside. One day, on his travels, Howard had a seizure and was late home. His wife, Kathleen, sat immobile at the family table with their children for four hours, the food turning cold and gelatinous.

When Howard returns, covered in mud because he has fallen into the river and had a fit, he stands in the door, then takes his place at the table. They give thanks and the family eats. Not a word of explanation is offered. Young George observes with intensity the abyss created by that silence.

These skills of narrative precision are all on display once again in Harding’s new book, This Other Eden. It tells the story of a small community that lives on Apple Island off the coast of Maine. Harding’s Maine is different from that of Elizabeth Strout but equally inclined to shape its inhabitants.

Again, he explores the subtle lives of those who are scarcely visible. In this case, a few dozen people of mixed ethnic backgrounds contend with an inhospitable island for more than a century. They mostly belong to three families and become inbred, to use an ugly expression. The children of the Lark family, for example, are intellectually disabled and suffer very poor vision. Harding acknowledges that the story owes a great deal to the fishing community on Malaga Island in Maine, which was forcibly broken up in 1912; residents were consigned to the Maine School for the Feeble Minded.

Harding is inspired by the thought that maybe these people weren’t feeble-minded at all, just vulnerable and creative. The oldest of them, Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, is a refugee from the American Civil War, finding his way to an island where he has heard that any kind of racial background is acceptable. Fifty years later, he lives inside a hollow oak tree and has little social life.
A carpenter by trade, he carves biblical scenes in the interstices of the oak. They are finely detailed and invisible to outsiders. Each one is a small work of art.