Tin Man: A Novel

I have reached the stage in my life where I am decluttering my life of unnecessary clutter. This book however, will remain on my shelves for years to come so that I can reread it again and again. The pacing, the characters, the visuals, the emotional impact are worth revisiting . . . like a favorite poem.

Often, when I’ve read a deep but elusive book, I look up reviews to see what others (others who must be perceptive to have their jobs) have made of it. This time I felt the reviewers missed the point. They seemed determined to read the story about sexual identity, making the main character’s teenage homosexuality merely an aberration. I can’t entirely entire blame them. This short book, simply yet beautifully written, points at but doesn’t explain what it’s about; the reader is forced to discern the essence like a scintillation counter infers radiation in the reaction of a detection material.There are three main characters with almost no attention given to any minor characters: Ellis, Michael and Annie. One might say there’s a fourth character: sunflowers in a print of a painting by Van Gogh and in Arles.The first half of the novel concerns Ellis’ grief at losing the two people central to his life: his wife Annie and his friend Michael. (Most reviewers seem to skip over the fact that the two were killed in the same auto accident, making it seem as if Ellis’ grief is solely over his wife’s death.) He is consumed remembering past joys with the other two. You don’t get a good sense of who or what he is other than the losses in his life. I can understand how The Globe and Mail reviewer wrote; “(Ellis), it seems, never loved anyone quite enough. This is when the title of the novel begins to make perfect sense. Where is Ellis’s heart?”But how do you reconcile that with a description of a photo of the three main characters almost at the end of the story? “…it wasn’t the woman, Annie, who held this small group together, but the man (Ellis) with scruffy dark hair. There was something in the way the other two looked at him, and that’s why he was in the middle, his arms tightly around them.” The reviews provide o clue why Ellis draws such love.The second half is Michael’s journal as he works through his grief over losing a lover to AIDS (although he’s clear that he never loved the man as he loved Ellis.) Like Ellis, he is consumed with remembrances of past joys. One might be tempted to reduce it to his own lost youth: “I look at these young men, not in envy but in wonder. It is for them now, the beauty of discovery, that endless moonscape of life unfolding.” And it is to the author’s credit that she recognizes humans are complex, loving and grieving for multiple, sometimes seemingly conflicting, reasons. In the same way, Michael leaves the ménage of Ellis and Annie because he wants sexual gratification, yet he never finds love, at least not the love he knew with Ellis.Compared to these two, Annie is almost a blank slate written on by Michael, vibrant and alive when he’s there, dull and conventional when he’s gone. “Without Michael’s energy and view of the world they (Ellis and Annie) became the settled married couple both had feared becoming.”Weaving through the realistic portrayal of sad lives are the sunflowers. Both Ellis and Michael move beyond grief by returning to Arles. Both can create again, one in paints, the other in words. It’s tempting, then, to interpret Ellis’s mother’s words (“Men and boys should be capable of beautiful things.”) to mean works of beauty. But that short sells the book. The author is talking about love. Not sex, although for both men sex is important, leading them to and away from love. The author is trying for a greater conception of love. A love like the sun to sunflowers. Caught in our bodies and conventions, we find it difficult to describe such love. It is among the truths only fiction can tell.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading "Tin Man," it's awfully well written but because of the lack of a protagonist or any significant conflict (other than the toxic masculinity of the two dads and society in general), the plot is very weak. This is one of those "and then... and then... and then..." plots that's livened up by the back-and-forth method of telling the story.The title "Tin Man" is a reference to Ellis's job at the car plant and (based on the one reference to "The Wizard of Oz") the Tin Man who doesn't have a heart (or does, but doesn't recognize it). The references to Walt Whitman's "O Captain, My Captain" also reinforce the gay underpinnings of the story.In addition to the general plot being bland, I found the story of Annie lacking. I could never get a grasp of her psychology. She's fun and quirky but not much of a character. All the women are pure virtue (I'm thinking especially of Ellis's mother and Mabel, who takes Michael in) and then they die.Gay life in the novel is thin. There's one visit to a bay bar by Annie and Michael, it's more about the tragedy of AIDS. I think that Chris, the young man with AIDS who Michael meets in the hospital could have rounded out the story a little, but it doesn't happen. I'm not sure, but this seems to be one of those novels that straight women write about gay men.The novel is full of descriptions of nature and flowers and France, maybe too much. Again, I think the writing is very fine but the story itself is small, which is probably OK since it's a short book.

This story is sad, filled with memories, regrets, love, and heartache. We meet Ellis in his 40s, a solitary man in a mindless job. He has neglected his home and himself for a few years. We learn that his neglect comes from having lost his wife. Ellis reviews his sad lonely life and how it got to this point. We gradually learn about Michael and their great friendship/love. Did Ellis regret his choice? I'm not sure. Ellis seems perfectly in love with Annie but we know he loved Michael. Annie was the safer choice in this small British town. The novel then takes on Michael's story. This is also a sad life. He lost the love of his life, and never fell in love again.

In recent years, I have only read a handful of contemporary novels written as well as TIN MAN. That Winman is able to nuance nearly fifty years of pertinent events and characters so beautifully into just a few more than two hundred pages is remarkable. One of the customer reviewers who did not like the book complained that the story is "disjointed." I recognize her reference, but what she observes in the text is not "disjointedness." The narrative flits from one spot to another on the story's timeline, out of sequence, not because of carelessness but deliberately. The author places words on a page as a painter applies pigment to a canvas: a spot of color here, then a little more there.... Along the way, another person watching the painter might see a mere glimpse of what the picture will finally be, but the full image only becomes crystal clear when the work is finished. In fact, we learn about the lives of our friends and acquaintances in exactly the same way: by bits and pieces presented to us over time and almost always out of sequence. In writing, this technique can be particularly effective, TIN MAN being an excellent case in point. The very reason Winman's story carries such emotional weight is because of the elegant pace at which we discover the full truth about these particularly lovable characters. TIN MAN is a rare gem of a book. I highly recommend it!

Beautiful and sad

少年EllisとMichael 、ふたりはいつも一緒。大人に成長しAnnieという女性の出現がふたりの世界に大きな影響を与える。Michaelが語る「Who were we? Ellis, me, and Annie. We are everything and then we broke.」このフレーズが 全てを物語っていると思います。MichaelはEllisもAnnie も愛していた、その愛の形は違うけれど。時が 行ったり来たりするので少し戸惑いますが、文章はシンプルで読みやすく美しい。ゴッホのひまわりの絵が物語に色を添えています。

A portrait of love, loss, loneliness all mixed in with the longings of nostalgic memory. Heartbreakingly beautiful. I liked the second half of the narration better than the first but it still deserves 5 stars.

Set out across time this book tells the story of different kinds of love and of relatioships that bind us for life and never leave us. Highly recommend it.

No entiendo qué es lo que está pasando con la literatura contemporánea? Todas las historias son iguales y son muy triviales. El lenguaje, la historia en sí... Una pérdida de tiempo.