Jerome, once an editor of Car and Driver, had settled into
apple-cider and organic-gardening rusticity in New Hampshire when
he decided to buy and rebuild an old pickup truck. To haul manure
to the garden. And that, from early reconnaissance to
disassembling, cleaning, and fixing, to the day when the 1950
Dodge, the Harry S. Truman, started to roll - that, folks, is the
plot. In between come heroic ruminations on land ethics, the
monstrous malfeasance of technology, the need to reclaim
nuts-and-bolts basics. Not to mention some passing thoughts on
competence as a signal of adulthood/manliness. In short, a goof on
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Leastwise, we hope it's
a goof, because Jerome's extended monologue on the metaphysics of
crankshafts, ignition systems, cylinders, valves, brakes, pistons,
and steering-wheel alignment is a work of sheer, clever contrivance
and only a liberal anointment of self-mockery saves the reader from
terminal boredom. After 15 months he realized that the damn truck
was just a truck. "Not project, process or product, not gesture,
philosophical statement, or symbolic act." Just a truck. (Actually,
you suspect he knew it all along.) The funny part is that it will
be read by antique car freaks who wouldn't dream of using it to
transport horse dung to the asparagus patch. (Kirkus Reviews)
"Know thy gadgets; first step in restoring some kind of wholeness
to one's life." So observes John Jerome about his purpose for
rebuilding a 1950 Dodge pickup. Yes, he needs the truck to haul
manure, but Jerome also hopes that "by knowing every nut,
lockwasher, and cotter pin I could have a machine that had some
meaning to me." Thus his year-long odyssey under the hood, among
the brake shoes and valves, becomes more than a mechanic's memoir;
it is a meditation on machines, metaphysics, and the moral
universe.
Nearly two decades after publication in 1977, the essential dilemma
of Truck still rings true: as Jerome dismantles the aged straight
six, he also disassembles our reliance on "two-hundred-dollar
appliances that sport flaws in thirty-five-cent parts" and decries
the "deliberate encapsulation, impenetrability, of the
overtechnologized things with which we furnish our lives." Despite
gouged knuckles, a frigid New Hampshire winter, frustrating and
inexplicable assemblies, and a close call when the truck rolls off
its jacks, he perseveres. In the end, he admits, "I did not find
God out there in the barn" among the cans of nuts and bolts." What
he does find, however, is that he must make peace with technology;
it's a mistake, he says, to "assume there is a point on that line
between the caveman's club and the moon shot that marks the moral
turnaround, before which technology was somehow benign, after which
it is malign." While Jerome gains a truck that runs-sometimes-we
gain new insight into a technology that continues to encroach upon
our lives.
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