Actors who become writers often say they were motivated by a feeling that they could do no worse than the words they are given to speak. As Tom Hanks has appeared in three movies based on the novels of Dan Brown, it is perhaps surprising that it has taken so long for the actor to be goaded into publishing his own prose.
He has started with stories, a standard beginners’ form, although at 400 pages-plus this debut set has a heft that rivals the collected volumes of some short story veterans.
Uncommon Type has more connective architecture than most collections: the first, seventh and last of the 17 stories feature the same characters, while four of the others take the form of pieces by a veteran columnist on a dying regional newspaper, Hank Fiset. He is the kind of hack who still likes to bash away at clattery metal keys, rather than purringly process his words on a screen, a preference that chimes with the overarching conceit of the book: each of the stories contains some reference to an old-fashioned typewriter.
This turns the book into a sort of game of “Where’s Olivetti?” In several stories set either side of the second world war, characters merely enter an office or have a mother who works as a secretary. Elsewhere, the cameos of technological nostalgia need to be more sneakily oblique: a crucial prop is discovered in a junk cupboard lodged behind “an old beat-up plaid typewriter case”.
The stories’ recurrent image is autobiographical: Hanks has spoken about his collection of more than 50 old typewriters and appeared in a documentary on typewriter obsession. But however diligently readers watch for pre-digital keyboards, they are inevitably also on the lookout for other carbon copies – fictional versions of Hanks himself, an unusually famous first-time fiction writer, who has offered this book rather than the more conventional memoir.
It might interest Freud that a recurrent trope in Hanks’s stories is stressing the dissimilarity of life to cinema: lovers worry that they have become “like characters in a movie”; siblings close in age refuse to dress “like twins in some movie”. Strikingly, though, the strongest stories are the most cinematic. “The Past Is Important to Us” is a kind of Groundhog Day romcom, in which a man is repeatedly able to time travel to a 1939 World’s Fair exhibit that depicts the America of 1960. “A Junket in the City of Light” enjoyably channels details and atmospheres of which Hanks has privileged knowledge. Rory Thorpe, an actor on a tour of European “markets” to promote the second sequel in the Cassandra Rampart action franchise, records – on an antique typewriter he finds in a retro-decorated hotel suite – a schedule that includes “Print Media Round Table #6 (approx 16 outlets)” and “TV interview with Petit Shoopi, a puppet who will ask you to sing along with her”. This account has the thrill of personal horror fictionally mediated.
As an actor, Hanks has also tried out an unusual variety of professions, settings and costumes, and some of these seem to have been a useful rehearsal for creative prose. Few other writers would have such easy access to precisely how it feels to wear the suits, shoes and hats that were male fashion in the 1930s. Apollo 13 surely helped with the moon-shot story, and Band of Brothers with the battle scene flashbacks in a tale about second world war veterans.
Having played an investigative reporter in Nora Ephron’s Broadway play Lucky Guy, and soon to portray the great Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in the Steven Spielberg movie The Post, Hanks seems to have become a missionary for print journalism. Note that newspaper man Hank Fiset has a first name that closely resembles the author’s second. There is often a powerful sense of other lives imagined at a level that goes deeper than writerly research.
The author’s day job less happily influences “Stay With Us”, a 55-page squib in the form of a screenplay. And, although Hanks thanks many names for editorial advice, they could sometimes have done more. The best sentences have a serviceable plain, clean style: “For lunch they ate at a little market that also had sidewalk tables with checkerboard cloths.” Elsewhere, though, there are clumsy word-clumps: a sequence involving both “ham salad” and “ham radio” becomes confusing, while “some” occurs three times within 11 words. Oddly, these are the sort of pile-ups that actors’ ears lead them to remove routinely from scripts.
The question writers are most commonly asked at literary festivals is whether they prefer to compose with a pen, laptop or typewriter, so Hanks, when puffing Uncommon Type, should prove the dream guest. But before attempting further fiction, he might be better employed translating “A Junket in the City of Light” or “The Past Is Important to Us” into the medium where his greatest talent lies.
• Mark Lawson’s The Allegations is published by Picador.
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