Try as we might, we are incomplete beings. Philosophy books, abs machines and piano lessons may nudge us forward, but no amount of self-discipline will change the fact that we see a gigantic world through one tiny peep hole. The supersalesman can't talk to his kids. The rocket scientist can't change his oil. And the President of the United States can't... Well, like I said.
We may try short-cuts, fast tracks or dilettantism to fill out the empty parts; self-medication, bluster or faith to paper them over. But there's just too much to life and too little of us to ever complete the job.
So some people scramble through life, as if a resume amounted to more than the paper it's printed on. Some strut, looking for a fight, find a few and declare mission accomplished. Some will pray their way through it, spending way too much time with the Friend who constantly disappoints, but hey, whose problem is that? And a lucky bunch root around until they find that person who says, usually between the lines, "You know what? I think we can do this thing."
Michael Perry's Truck: A Love Story is about a man acknowledging his limits as well as his assets, especially those that come from family and community, from brothers and buddies, from work and from putting work off. But most of all it is about how love makes us, if not whole, at least more complete than when we go crashing around the planet on our own.
The truck part of the story can be told fairly straightforwardly. Perry owns a crumbling 1951 International Harvester pickup that he has resolved to get running again. The only problem is, he doesn't have the skills to do it or the money to hire it out, and either, in his small Wisconsin community, would be an admission of unmanliness. Perry has already come to terms with his odd blend of deer hunting bachelor firefighting weepy sensitive male nurseness, and he readily shares stories of his indifferent housekeeping and failed gardening. His shop skills are spotty, and mechanical diagrams might as well be Mandarin.
But he loves that truck. Truck love is something you understand immediately or may not get at all. Women are not immune, but it seems mostly wired into male circuits. There are different degrees of passion, certainly. Not just any truck will turn the truck lover's head, and contrary to other dumb reflexes, the older the better. Affinity for a particular brand may be determined in early childhood, but that doesn't mean a man can't look.
A cover blurb has already made the comparison with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which also occurred to me, because Perry does a nice job of explicating the pleasure of working on machines and the special three-dimensional intelligence it requires — and through the process, telling us a great deal about the narrator and the men who round out his world. But Zen was a groundbreaking book. Truck is just a fine one. Plus, I don't recall Robert Pirsig having much of a sense of humor. Perry will make you laugh again and again.
In the world of the certifiable stoic, the repression of emotion is the more obvious half of the battle. The rest of your time is consumed with masking even the appearance of the existence of desire. Anyone can hold back a tear or dodge a hug — it takes a real hardcore Norwegian bachelor to pretend you don't want a cookie.
As good as the book might be at explaining to women why their men disappear into the garage or linger at the used truck lot, the truck tale merely provides a spine for other love stories.
Perry, an unmarried 38, is breaking down like the truck in his yard. He has been taken for plenty of test drives and a lease arrangement or two, but no buyers have stepped up, and now he is in danger of rusting into the weeds. It is a condition immediately recognizable to anyone who has stepped into the dwelling of a bachelor farmer or jackpine savage. Things reach a point of no return, woman-wise.
A gardening thread, which Perry uses mostly to build a case for his ineptness, slows things down at the start. I won't get much into the romance story at the center of the book because Perry reveals enough of his inner workings and external failings to make you wonder whether things will work out, and you deserve to find out for yourself. He is unfailingly generous in his presentation of family and friends, making you think living in a very small town and going to fire department bean feeds might not be a bad life at all.
Most of all, he delivers a full-bore rendition of how and why a man falls in love — not chases a woman or gets married, but falls in love slow motion like with the things a younger man could never see — and resolves to stay there, against all odds.
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