'Hanks is a natural born storyteller' – Review: Uncommon Type

William Heinemann, £16.99

Review by Allan Hunter

TOM Hanks is a natural born storyteller. Watch him on any television chat show as he sets the scene, sketches in a quirky detail, adds shade and texture, slips in a wry observation or two and reveals the pay-off with the panache of a stand-up comic delivering a killer punchline. It is hardly surprising that he has added writer to his skills as an Oscar-winning actor, director and producer. Hanks has contributed to Vanity Fair and The New Yorker among others and you can hear his voice and feel the warm glow of his genial personality in Uncommon Type, his first collection of short stories.

There is a breezy, chipper quality to Hanks writing that seems to perfectly reflect a figure we think we know from his signature roles in films like Big, Forrest Gump and Saving Private Ryan. There is an ease in his writing and a pleasure in the reading. He is clearly someone who delights in the rhythm and pacing found in a finely crafted paragraph. He revels in those little popping candy moments as an unfamiliar word explodes on the page or the way the use of onomatopoeia lifts a sentence. The book is lightly seasoned with words like lollygaggers, scallywags and kablooey.

Hanks sunny view of the world extends through many of the stories in the book. He has a sustaining belief that things generally work out for the best in the end. That is as true of a young, aspiring Broadway actress struggling with all the disappointments of her hard knocks life in the New York of 1978 in Who’s Who as it is of a mother making a fresh start in A Month On Greene Street or a young boy on a 10th birthday visit to his divorced mother in the Spring of 1970 in A Special Weekend.

Hanks view of America isn’t quite as wholesome as a Norman Rockwell illustrations but he does believe in neighbourhood, friends, community and the innate decency of most human beings. He belongs to a tradition of American storytellers that includes Mark Twain or O’Henry although there is a range of work in Uncommon Valour that defies such a catch-all definition. The charmingly observed time-travelling romance

The Past Is Important To Us has echoes of HG Wells and Philip K Dick as a billionaire businessman uses his wealth to become a repeat customer of a groundbreaking service that can transport him back to the World’s Fair in 1939. Naturally, he falls heads over heels for a mysterious, beguiling woman in green called Carmen. Like F Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby he becomes infatuated with the woman and the possibility of losing her forever. The only solution is to to risk everything to keep returning to the past. The whole story would make a perfect Twilight Zone episode.

There are recurring themes and motifs throughout the stories. Hanks was obsessed with space travel long before he starred in Apollo 13, producer the documentary series From The Earth To The Moon or befriended Buzz Lightyear in the Toy Story films. Hanks once describing himself as “ Space Boy” for his obsessive childhood interest in the Apollo space missions and the possibility of a human landing on the moon. There are references to astronauts and missions and one story Alan Bean Plus Four in which a group of friends mount their own, low-tech trip to the moon and back.

Hanks also has a fascination with typewriters and they have a significance both large and small in virtually every story in the collection. He slips in the names of makes and models, from a Swiss Hermes 2000 to a Green Royal Desktop like the equivalent of a Hitchcock cameo in the master of suspenses films. He sings the old-fashioned virtues of a typewritten note, thank-you letter, romantic missive or CV. If you ever plan to contact Hanks in search of an autograph, a typewritten request seems to be the way to his heart.

Hanks also celebrates old-fashioned journalism with constant interruptions from Hank Fiset and extracts from his column Our Town Today. A regular reader of any almost any newspaper will recognise the Fiset type; he is someone who regards it as their mission in life to argue that things were much better in some unspecified golden past and that no matter what sophistication and pleasures entices in major metropolitan areas there is nothing quite like home. Why travel when everything you could possibly want is right here on your doorstep?

Uncommon Type has tales of fractured families and broken hearts, faltering relationships and people who are happy being just the way they are rather than transforming themselves into something unrecognisable for the sake of a brand new lover, as explored in Three Exhausting Weeks. There is a dark side to some of the stories but the overriding impression is of a Hanks who is an incorrigible romantic and a cock-eyed optimist.

Many of the stories are set in a past that he gathers around him like a comfort blanket. The whole book is tinged with a yearning for a more innocent time in which the American Dream still shone bright with a promise that attracted tired, poor, huddled masses from all around the globe. Hanks the writer makes it an inviting place to spend some time.