The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 18 July 2008
by Michael Perry
Americans are dearly in love with their vehicles. For better or worse, they are key to our very identity. Back in the days before cars, did we adore our buckboards and buggies in the same way? Did we love our horses as much as we love our Porsches? Maybe. Nowadays, we love our cars, but hate all the expensive gas they consume. We might love our cars for nostalgic reasons. Michael Perry has a big old International Harvester L-120 pickup rusting in his front yard, but he has a lot of history with it, too. What ensues in this book, ostensibly, is a year-long project to restore the truck to operating, but not showroom, condition. He just wants to be able to get out on the road with the thing and at least partially live in the fantasy world of old Harvester advertising campaigns, particularly those featuring Irma Harding, International's answer to Betty Crocker. It's a year-long project, and the book is broken up into chapters for each month of the year. It isn't until well into April, though, that Perry gets to work on the truck at all. In the tradition, perhaps, of A Year in Provence we have, maybe, A Year in Wisconsin, a sort of wistful meditation on living in rural middle-America at the turn of the 21st century. The book is a mish-mash essay on living in a small town, with small town ways that have long-since collided with the modern world as it approaches on paved roads and strip malls. Perry reflects on so many topics, it is hard to encapsulate them here. But he weaves them so seamlessly, that the book is a fast-moving and entertaining read. We learn of his youthful mullet-headed days, his love life, his somewhat green thumb, his family, what he listens to on the radio, some of his politics, a book tour, and his thoughts on guns and hunting. He's a bit of a redneck, a trained nurse and a volunteer paramedic, and is erudite in a way that evokes an even-handed sympathy with the diverse ways in which we all live. Perry meanders through his story, which has a folksy feel to it. It is also heartfelt, sympathetic, insightful and sensitive. He is a redneck humanist and would, no doubt, object to being characterized a redneck, as his writing paints a weaving line down the middle. Along the way, Perry falls in love (maybe the real love story of the book), and the relationship unfolds within his life, grows as his garden withers. The book is surprising, funny, entertaining and warm. It would be giving too much away, though, to say if, at the end of this year in Wisconsin, the truck is running, or Perry is still with his new-found love.