Review | Screen nice guy Tom Hanks sticks to type with short-story collection

Uncommon Type
by Tom Hanks
Knopf

One mark of success as a writer is to have your name immortalised as a literary term. You don’t need to have read Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925) or The Castle (1926) to have a sense of what the “Kafkaesque” involves: heavy paranoia, circling plots spun from nightmares of existential guilt and authoritarian super-states overruling freedom of choice.

“Orwellian” has a similar meaning (albeit with slightly shorter haircuts), while “Beckettian” hints at absurd, pitiless investigations into the grim nature of experience, “Dickensian” at ultra-detailed stories with larger-than-life characters and a social conscience. Then there’s “Archer-esque”: eerily familiar plots punctuated by pompous asides but always with twists in the tale.

Does “Hanks-ean” cut it? “Hanks-esque”? Maybe “Hanks-ish” best suits the actor’s famously genial and inoffensive screen persona. Indeed, the title of his first book jabs a pun at this very reputation. Hanks, after all, has become famous precisely by playing common types. He is to the everyman what Dennis Hopper was to mavericks teetering on the edge of sanity, or Jackie Chan to grinning martial artists. He is also that most rare of modern-day stars: the decent do-gooder out of sync with a world of greed, materialism and violence.

It is this Hanks that is beloved of cinema-goers and world leaders alike. When President Xi Jinping visited the United States for the first time, in 2015, he landed in Seattle, a city he knew from Hanks’ celebrated 1993 rom-com Sleepless in Seattle.