Tom Hanks’s typewriter stories reveal his inventive mind
From Splash in 1984 to Sully in 2016, Tom Hanks has spent three decades convincing cinema audiences that he’s an average Joe thrown into extraordinary situations. His first collection of stories reverses the trick, unveiling the inventive mind behind his regular-guy façade.
Hanks gave us a glimpse into his interior life on Desert Island Discs last year. His requested luxury was a Hermes 3,000 manual typewriter and paper. It turns out that Hanks is a connoisseur of old typewriters, and owns 250. His article on the topic, published in The New York Times in 2013, proved he could write as well as type:
“Remingtons from the 1930s go THICK THICK. Midcentury Royals sound like a voice repeating the word CHALK. CHALK. CHALK CHALK. Even the typewriters made for the dawning jet age (small enough to fit on the fold-down trays of the first 707s), like the Smith Corona Skyriter and the design masterpieces by Olivetti go FITT FITT FITT like bullets from James Bond’s silenced Walther PPK.”
Typewriters link all 17 stories in this book, allowing Hanks to tap back in time to realistic Seventies family break-ups and, less effectively, forward into futuristic steampunk.
His characters, like the machines on which he creates them, are idiosyncratic, disconnected from the mainstream. Take the “lazy-butt loner” of “Three Exhausting Weeks”, the first story. He falls into a relationship with a ferociously efficient woman who attempts to get him up to her speed. There’s nervous comedy as he switches up his sofa-bound lifestyle to try scuba diving, salad and sex: “She cackled as she reached into my pants without so much as kissing me. I was either the luckiest man in the world or being played for a sucker.” The reader expects this to go one of two ways, but Hanks wrong-foots us, deftly, by finding a third.
These characters and their friends — Steve Wong and MDash — recur through the stories. Reflecting Hanks’s liberalism, they’re a closeknit, mixed-gender, multicultural group of oddballs floating around the iconography of America. They initiate their own surreal space programme, then wind up at the bowling alley.
There are some duds. The ramblings of an old school reporter in “Hank Fisket” prove tedious, while the sob story of a homesick, provincial actress on Broadway, despite the charms of detail, is nothing we haven’t heard before. But Hanks’s account of an illegal immigrant is strikingly strange, and the pay-off of a tale about a single mother on guard against her neighbour’s romantic overtures manages to feel counter-intuitive and satisfyingly inevitable: the sort of thing Stephen King might write when not on horror duty.
There’s darkness too: infidelity, war, Hollywood press junkets. Hanks’s voice is as direct and dry as the one we know from his films. I occasionally found that a problem, as I couldn’t stop hearing — and even seeing — him. The story about a First World War veteran? Oh yeah: the guy from Saving Private Ryan. About a billionaire tech exec? Yup: that’s the creep from The Circle. But then Hanks has played so many roles. Of course they will have rubbed off, on him and on us. His book reflects that variety. You never know what you’re gonna get next.
Typewriters link all 17 stories in this book, allowing Hanks to tap back in time to realistic Seventies family break-ups and, less effectively, forward into futuristic steampunk.