Email
A golden age for short fiction, which has seen Alice Munro win the Nobel and George Saunders take home the Folio prize, today became even brighter after the New Yorker unveiled the latest addition to its storied ranks of contributors: Tom Hanks.
Home to writers acclaimed as some of the world’s finest, from Haruki Murakami to Margaret Atwood, the New Yorker has included the actor’s story, Alan Bean Plus Four, in its 27 October issue. Hanks’s first short story tells of a trip to the moon cobbled together by four friends.
“Travelling to the moon was way less complicated this year than it was back in 1969, as the four of us proved, not that anyone gives a whoop,” opens Hanks, in the voice of his deadpan narrator. Then, later: “I suggested that we schedule liftoff in conjunction with the 45th anniversary of Apollo 11, the most famous space flight in history, but that was a no-go, as Steve Wong had dental work scheduled for the third week of July.”
Hanks, who played Jim Lovell in the film Apollo 13, litters his writing with references to technology, with one of his characters watching season four of Breaking Bad on his iPad “during all the downtime on our long haul”, and the friends taking “hundreds of selfies with the Earth in the window”.
The group later watches “Earthrise” to an unexpected sound track: “MDash yelled, ‘Hit Play, hit Play!’ just as a blue-and-white patch of life – a slice of all that we have made of ourselves, all that we have ever been – pierced the black cosmos above the sawtooth horizon. I was expecting something classical, Franz Joseph Haydn or George Harrison, but The Circle of Life, from The Lion King, scored our home planet’s rise over the plaster-of-Paris moon.”
Their return home is something of an anticlimax. “Questions arose about what we were going to do upon our return, apart from making some bitchin’ posts on Instagram.”
Writer Chris Power, the Guardian’s resident short story expert, said the piece reminded him, “to a degree”, of TC Boyle’s output in the 1980s, “when he was leaving Donald Barthelme’s orbit”.
“The characters aren’t so important here, really, but they help break up the technical and historical information about space travel that he seems most interested in,” noted Power. “The structure is competent and comedic – set-up, punch; set-up, punch. There are a couple of more lyrical passages, but tonally they jut out from the narrator’s conversational tone.”
Overall, Power found the story “disposable, but enjoyable”, adding that “writing a short story about the moon puts you in a probably unwinnable contest against several stories from Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics”.
Hanks, who also narrated an audio version of the story for the New Yorker, told the magazine: “I’ve been around great storytellers all my life and, like an enthusiastic student, I want to tell some of my own. And I read so much nonfiction that the details stack up in my head and need a rearranging sometimes.”
Citing his literary heroes as Chaim Potok, Alan Furst, Richard Ben Cramer, David McCullough and Stephen Ambrose, Hanks said he hopes to write more stories. “I’ll keep listening,” said the actor, who also penned the screenplay for the films Larry Crowne and That Thing You Do!
