Quick Take
- Narration: Self-narrated by Perry with the warmth and cadence of a practiced Wisconsin storyteller; his voice is native to the material and gives Tom Hartwig’s dialogue genuine life.
- Themes: Aging and equanimity, rural American resilience, the friendship between men across generations
- Mood: Warm and unhurried, with flashes of philosophical depth that arrive like the best kind of surprise
- Verdict: A quiet, beautifully written portrait of an old farmer and the younger man who kept showing up to listen, genuinely moving without ever reaching for it.
I found Visiting Tom on a recommendation from a listener who described it as the kind of book that slows you down in the best possible way. That is almost exactly right. I was halfway through a busy week when I started it, and within twenty minutes I had abandoned whatever mental list I had been working through and was simply present in Michael Perry’s company, driving out to see a man named Tom Hartwig on a Wisconsin farm that sits six feet from an interstate that was shoved through his front yard in 1965. That detail alone tells you what kind of story this is.
Perry is a Wisconsin writer with a devoted following, and Visiting Tom is, by the assessment of at least one longtime reader, his most mature book. The subject is genuinely unusual: Tom Hartwig, an 82-year-old machinist and farmer who builds homemade cannons, drives a team of oxen in local parades, makes gag shovel handles and parts for quarter-million-dollar farm equipment in the same shop, and converses about the meaning of a well-lived life with the patience of someone who has had decades to figure it out.
Tom Hartwig’s Shop and What It Contains
Perry describes Tom’s workspace as an antique store stocked by Rube Goldberg, curated by Hunter Thompson, and rearranged by a small earthquake. That sentence earns its laughs, but it also captures something true about the man at the center of this memoir: Tom Hartwig exists in a kind of cheerful defiance of the organizing principles of the modern world. He is not performing eccentricity; he is simply the product of a time and place that valued self-sufficiency and ingenuity more than tidiness or compliance.
The cannon-making and the batches of potentially extralegal explosives are present in the memoir not as quirky local color but as evidence of a disposition. Tom’s relationship with the four-lane interstate that runs past his kitchen window summarizes his position: he did not want it, could not stop it, and has spent fifty years deciding how much of his inner life it would be permitted to occupy. That negotiation, quiet and daily, is what Perry finds most instructive and what he renders most beautifully.
Conversations Across the Kitchen Table
What elevates Visiting Tom beyond a character study is the dual frame Perry constructs. He is not just writing about Tom; he is writing about what Tom means to him at a particular moment in his own life, approaching sixty years of marriage from his side, raising two daughters on a small Wisconsin farm, worrying about money and time and how to be a good father to girls who will grow up and leave. When the two men sit at Tom’s kitchen table as husbands and as fathers of daughters, as Perry frames it, the memoir finds its deepest current.
Perry is alive to the comedy in his situation. He makes a fool of himself in a protracted dispute with his local town council that he describes with exactly the right amount of self-deprecation. His ability to hold the funny and the serious at the same time is one of the more reliable pleasures of the book and the quality that most clearly distinguishes him from writers who handle similar material with too much solemnity.
What Self-Narration Adds to Perry’s Prose
Perry reading his own work is the correct choice. He has a radio performer’s timing, having spent years on the Wisconsin Public Radio circuit, and his voice carries the specific warmth of someone who grew up in the region he is writing about. Tom Hartwig’s dialogue, rendered in Perry’s careful approximation of a Wisconsin farm accent, sounds genuine rather than performed.
The prose itself rewards the audio format because Perry’s sentences are rhythmic and carefully structured. He knows when to pause and when to push forward, and his narration reflects that knowledge. A reviewer who has followed his work since Population 485 describes Visiting Tom as the book where his prose elevated to something genuinely memorable. That elevation is audible. The final third, where Tom’s equanimity in the face of time running short becomes something close to a lesson in how to live, arrives with full force because of how patiently the earlier chapters have built toward it.
Who Should Spend Time on This Farm
Visiting Tom is for listeners who appreciate slow, attentive literary nonfiction that takes its subject seriously without taking itself too seriously. Fans of essays in the tradition of E.B. White or Wendell Berry will find it comfortable and often surprising. Those looking for plot-driven narrative or broader cultural argument will find the pace demands patience. But the patience is rewarded, particularly in the final third, where Tom’s equanimity in the face of time running short becomes something close to a lesson in how to live without ever being stated as one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you need to know anything about Wisconsin or rural American culture to appreciate Visiting Tom?
No. The specific geography grounds the story, but the questions Perry is working through, about aging, friendship, fatherhood, and what an honorably lived life looks like, are not regional.
How much of the memoir is about Perry himself versus Tom Hartwig?
Roughly equal. Perry’s own life, including his young daughters, his farm, and his town council battles, runs as a parallel thread. The two lives illuminate each other in the way that good literary essays tend to do.
Is the book actually funny, or is the humor incidental to the heavier themes?
Perry is genuinely funny, and the humor is structural, not decorative. The lightness is what makes the more affecting passages land without tipping into sentiment.
How does the audio hold up at just over seven hours? Does the pace feel right?
The length is well-matched to the material. Perry’s prose is efficient and the memoir never meanders, though its deliberate slowness means listeners in a hurry will get less from it than those who can give it sustained attention.
