It's a Guy Thing

By Carolyn See,
who may be reached at www.carolynsee.com
Friday, October 20, 2006

TRUCK

A Love Story

By Michael Perry

HarperCollins. 281 pp. $24.95

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, here's Christmas, coming around again; time for you to start making your gift lists. And, as always, after you've broken your recipients into the usual categories (young couples, the grandparents, teenage girls, little kids), there remains that elusive, oddly seductive subgroup: "problematic guys." They may be winsome and shy as deer. They live in an apartment you've never seen. They drink draft beer at a local bar, with a couple of buddies, equally tweaked. They wear Pendleton shirts, sometimes too long between washings. They stay out in the garage, fiddling for hours with the car. You can see their legs sticking out.

Everybody in the Western world has about five of these guys on his or her list, and "Truck: A Love Story" is the perfect present for them: (a) it's under $30; (b) it validates their whole way of life; and (c) you can give it to high-end guys, too, because Michael Perry has written about his rural, sort-of-social-antisocial life in Esquire, Utne Reader and an earlier, well-received memoir titled "Population: 485."

"Truck" follows a classic, year-in-the-life construction. As it opens in January 2003, Perry is living what he presumes to be a permanent, fairly pleasant bachelor existence in the very small town of New Auburn, Wis. He takes his pleasure in the simple things: "This morning for coffee I ground four scoops of Farmer to Farmer Guatemalan Medium and when I pulled the grinder cap and sniffed, it was all I could do not to flop right over and shake my leg like a dog."

He's looking at the new year with a couple of projects in mind. He's intent on planting an improved garden. As a descendant -- in his heart and mind, at least -- of Henry David Thoreau, Perry aspires to live a frugal existence with a direct connection to the land. (He grew up on a farm with chickens and so on, and his vague dreams of the future nearly always include chickens.) His other project will be more difficult, but it's been burning along in his mind for months. There's a 1951 International Harvester L-120 pickup truck that's been sitting dead in his driveway for a long time. He bought it when he was still in nursing school, for $150. He loves that truck and longs to get it running again.

These are modest, peaceful aims. At age 38 he's given up on ever finding a girlfriend and hasn't had a date for a year. Now, he just wants to hang with his brother-in-law, Mark, and fix up that truck. He needs to keep in touch with his recently widowed and remarried brother Jed and also his truly eccentric brother John, who lives in a self-built shack out in the woods with no indoor plumbing. Perry himself is no recluse; he's a member of the volunteer fire department, but he prefers to keep a low profile, do some writing (which he downplays), go to the stock car races, just hang.

He and his brothers manage to get the truck over to Mark's wonderfully outfitted workshop-garage. They loop down a couple of "trouble lights," and the hours of puttering commence. Over a long period, the truck will be taken apart and put back together again. These passages are wonderfully evocative. Just the words "trouble lights" may carry a Proustian jolt for some guys, or for women who remember dads out in the garage, fiddling with something, a car or a piece of furniture, the trouble light swinging down low so you can get a better look.

Then, just as Perry seems to have come to terms with his ascetic existence, he meets a woman, Anneliese, a single mom with a beautiful 3-year-old daughter. The way he meets her is a writer's dream, a shy man's dream. After he gives a reading at a local library, she e-mails him and asks him out for coffee. It turns out she's a friend of one of his relatives. She's his kind of person; he's her kind of person. A courtship begins.

Meanwhile, the volunteer fire department holds its annual dinner, and he participates. He goes to those stock car races. He suffers the agony of a lonely man doing his own grocery shopping. Perry also has some of the generic troubles of the middle-aged man: a bout with gout, a troublesome spot in his vision that's probably never going to go away. He's also got a very profound -- again, played down -- choice: Should he stay with the staid, unthreatening comforts of bachelorhood, or should he cast his lot with the essentially messy, risky enterprise of marriage? It's a question for guys pushing 40 (or 30 or 50) everywhere. Can the old rusty truck be made to run again? Can the heart jump-start itself and shift into love? Buy a stack of these books for the elusive guys in your life and see what happens.

Sunday in Book World

· Barack Obama and Andrew Sullivan play politics.

· Mark Danielewski plays tricks.

· Johnny Unitas throws the ball.

· Erik Larson gets thunderstruck.

· And Alex Kuczynski has some work done.