Review by Mack Hassler
“Mark Twain’s Huck Finn underlies all American Literature”
Character of Hemingway in Midnight in Paris (2011) by Woody Allen
When he writes, produces, and directs film, Woody Allen can be brilliant. In the epigraph above, he captures an idea about Hemingway often found in scholarly work. I had thought I was done discussing text-influenced prose in these reviews of Yooper writing until I began to read James by Percival Everett (just awarded the National Book Award). What Everett shows us is the power of the speaker in a piece of prose that will be my main topic in this review of Tom Leonard’s Letters Home, which reads as about the same length as the novel James, though much shorter in page count. The Memoir by Leonard focuses on a trip of two boys and resonates in time and in geography with the two peninsulas of Michigan. The Everett novel is a monologue by the Black friend of Huck Finn in that journey by two boys on the Mississippi. But Huck’s friend is transformed into a totally different Jim. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of books. What this means is that, equivalent to Samuel Johnson as well as all of his hired helpers who read for him in that legendary loft near the dome of St. Peters in London as they worked on Johnson’s Dictionary, James can speak with reference to any book in the Enlightenment. Very funny and very hard to explain.
The Memoir is not nearly as funny nor hard to explain but does echo Twain’s masterpiece… if not the recent Everett retelling. In fact, there are times in the Tom Leonard trek out to Gwinn, near Marquette, and back when it would be easier for me to follow the bookish and intellectual track of James; but this is a review of a bike ride and not the muddy waters of the Mississippi with reference to the Enlightenment. Tom and his biking friend are just two “scruffy teenagers” from Wacousta. On their first day out, they make it to the little town of Alma just along Old U,S 27. In the 1960s, Alma was still pumping natural gas that with the burnoff makes it seem more like Dante’s “Inferno” than bucolic mid-Michigan. p 14. A young gas station attendant let them sleep in his backyard and meet his wife and infant child Tom’s friend Mike had sore shoulders, and they had just completed one day of the 800-mile ride. A bit over a year later, when Mike’s bike finally breaks down completely, Tom does the last 140 miles completely by himself, getting himself back to Wacousta by Lansing on August 12, 1965.
This is all done following a year or so of planning, getting themselves both new bikes, as well as getting permissions and cautions from their parents that included envelopes with stamps so they could mail home where they are (no cellphone then or other electronics to keep in touch). I think an amazing confidence in these two boys and an act of Faith. Twain’s Huck and Jim were much more on their own, but America was younger then. At that time, also, no bikes were allowed on the Bridge. So they took their bikes on the ferry over to Mackinac Island, then from the Island to St. Ignace.
All the rigors of the trek had bonded the boys beautifully, friends and conversations for life. Mike passed away in 2017; and Tom, though having lost most of his vision, set out to write the Letters Home reflecting on what a chance they had taken and on how strong and blessed they had been throughout. In his epilogue, he concludes, “It is his absence that has led me, forced me, to take this journey back, as best I can, to days when we were still companions.” p. 112 This is itself an inspirational book, spurred in the writing by death and detailed throughout, haunted as much by the state of Michigan just as Twain’s trek is haunted by America and the Mississippi, and Everett’s by the freedom of the Enlightenment.
Letters Home: A Memoir of Michigan’s “Up North” Country, by Tom Leonard (Thomas Leonard, self-published, 2024) 112 pages, n.p. pbk.
