book reviews on tom lake

Ann Patchett’s Pandemic Novel

When the author Ann Patchett was five years old, her family broke apart. Her mother divorced her father, married the man with whom she’d been having an affair, and moved Patchett and her sister from Los Angeles to Nashville. Patchett gained four new siblings and an additional parent. Years later, when she was twenty-seven, her mother remarried again. “I suffered from abundance,” she writes in “My Three Fathers,” a 2020 essay for this magazine. As a girl, she would fly back to L.A. for a week every summer to see her birth father. Often, they’d go to Forest Lawn cemetery. “We would bring a lunch and walk the paths through the exemplary grass to see where the movie stars were buried,” Patchett writes. She adds that the scent of carnations can still return her to “those happy afternoons.” The cemetery, crowded but lonely, gives off echoes of her unconventional ménage, and Patchett fashions it into a figure for family itself: a plot in which you’re trapped with a bunch of strangers, a place of mingled loss and togetherness.

Most of Patchett’s work is directly or indirectly about the experience of being stuck in a difficult family. She is a connoisseur of ambivalent interpersonal dynamics within closed groups. “Bel Canto” (2001), her breakout novel, traces the bonds that develop among terrorists and their prisoners. “State of Wonder” (2011) follows a scientist searching for her colleagues in the Amazon rain forest. In the Pulitzer finalist “The Dutch House” (2019), two grown siblings return compulsively to their unhappy childhood: “Like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns.”

Patchett is interested in how people, in families and elsewhere, come to terms with painful circumstances; how they press beauty from constraint, assuming artificial or arbitrary roles that then become naturalized, like features of the landscape. In “Commonwealth” (2016), her most autobiographical novel, six children flung together by their parents’ affair form a fraught alliance, in which the older kids routinely drug their baby brother with Benadryl. The father leaves his gun within easy reach of the kids, and the mother grabs glassy-eyed time-outs in the car. One son becomes obsessed with the art of setting fires, almost burning down his school.

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In her twenties, Franny, the protagonist, appears to transcend her upbringing by recounting it to a famous novelist, who turns it into a best-selling work of fiction. It’s a thrillingly illicit inversion, or seems to be: Franny was trapped in her family, but now she has trapped them in a book; she has transformed the sinkhole of her past into a resource. But as her relatives bear up under “the inestimable burden of their lives”—the kids marrying and procreating, the parents retiring and sickening—their family narratives evolve. A mute sibling is rebranded “the smart one.” When Franny reconnects with Albie, the brother so monstrous his siblings fed him Benadryl, she notes with surprise that “there wasn’t anything so awful about him. It was only that he was a little kid.” Franny’s family is a resource, she realizes, but she has mistaken its nature—it is not an heirloom to be handed off to a stranger but a commons, an inexhaustible font of ever-changing roles and stories. As the novel draws to a close, Patchett celebrates this reserve, accelerating through scenes of connection: a beach trip, a party, a talk on the porch. The gatherings suggest that talismanic word, abundance. They portray a kind of land wealth—a richness of common ground.

In “Tom Lake,” Patchett’s ninth and newest novel (Harper), members of a summer theatre troupe in rural Michigan in the nineteen-eighties coalesce into something like an incestuous family. They share housing, meals, and beds; their community is rife with intense, fleeting intimacies. As the group is putting on a production of “Our Town,” by Thornton Wilder, the actress cast as Emily, the play’s ingénue, drops out. A young performer named Lara arrives to pinch-hit. Lara didn’t formally study theatre, but she has an uncanny ability to inhabit the role. “He understood what he was looking at,” she says of one director. “A pretty girl who wasn’t so much playing a part as she was right for the part she was playing.”

At Tom Lake, the town where the troupe is based, Lara is greeted by the cast as star, savior, and potential love interest. She has eyes only for twenty-eight-year-old Peter Duke, who plays Emily’s father. Within days, she and Duke are spending all their time together, rehearsing, having sex, or swimming in the lake. The summer becomes a blur of overlapping absorptions—in Wilder’s language, in the water, in one another. “We wore our swimsuits under our clothes and ran to the lake in lieu of eating lunch,” Lara recalls. “We could get from the stage to being nearly naked and fully submerged in four minutes flat.”

Tom Lake is a fairy tale, a conjunction of person, time, and place, and it is as transient as any idyll, slipping through Lara’s fingers even as half a day seems to last “a solid six months.” “No one gets to go on playing Emily forever,” she thinks, preëmptively grieving. The curtain falls sooner than she expects. On the tennis court, Lara ruptures her Achilles tendon; her understudy, a magnetic Black dancer named Pallace, steps into the Emily part. Watching her friend take the stage, Lara later remembers, “I cried because she was that good. I cried because I would never play Emily again. I cried because I had loved that world so much.” When the summer ends, Duke goes on to a wildly successful career in Hollywood. Lara quits acting, marries a cherry farmer, and becomes a mother.

In the spring of 2020, at the start of the COVID -19 lockdown, Lara, now fifty-seven, is sheltering in place on the family farm with her husband, Joe Nelson, and their three twentysomething daughters, Emily, Maisie, and Nell. With harvesters scarce, the Nelsons have to pick and process their own fruit; to make the time go by faster, Lara tells the girls about her brief career as an actor.

The early pandemic, with its claustrophobic intimacy, seems almost tailor-made for Patchett’s interests. “Tom Lake” is about being caught in an intractable family situation. It is about being constrained by one’s role—in this case, motherhood—and it is about the transformations wrought by the passage of time and the search for confinement’s upsides. The seasonal beauty of the fruit trees evokes the ephemeral loveliness of youth, romance, and fame; the novel, which is haunted by classics of theatre, repeatedly invokes Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” as if Lara, like that play’s central character, were lost in a reverie about herself in her prime.

But Patchett airs the suggestion that Lara is stranded in the past only to gently put it to rest. Despite Duke’s “ubiquitous presence in the world,” Lara notices, scrubbing a lasagna pan to the strains of one of his movies, “I thought of him remarkably little.” Chekhov, with his warnings about the hazards of nostalgia, turns out to be a red herring; a bigger portion of the book’s soul resides in “Our Town,” Wilder’s play about daily life which ends in a cemetery, where the dead are “weaned away from the earth.” Lara uses the text as a touchstone, channelling its mood of elegiac acceptance as she carefully detaches herself from her old wounds and triumphs:

There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well.

Lara’s thinking here feels infused with sensitivity to the personal—to the vividness of life as it pierces a single subject—but the immediacy of pain and joy has mellowed, over time, into something richer and stranger. “Had every sight or sound of him sent me off on a pilgrimage of nostalgia or excoriation I would have lost my mind years before,” Lara says of Duke. Later: “The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.”

A story is artificial, which means it can be fun. Lara isn’t so much recalling the summer of 1988 as she is performing it—playing both her younger self and her current one, selectively concocting a PG-rated soap opera for her wide-eyed Zoomers. She finesses, elides. “I’m not telling them the good parts,” she says, meaning the incredible sex with Duke. The girls, participating in the game, cast themselves as a socially progressive Greek chorus. “You can’t say ‘crazy,’ ” one interrupts. When Lara describes Pallace’s “preposterous” legs, they protest that she is objectifying her.

In these scenes, the source of Lara’s contentment is sweetly obvious. When Nell laments the celebrity Lara could perhaps have been, she exclaims, “Look at this! Look at the three of you! You think my life would have been better spent making commercials for lobster rolls?” The pandemic portions of the book conjure an adult world of trade-offs and compromise, in which family offers abundant recompense for lacklustre Google search results. The girls themselves are delicious creations. Emily is fiery; Maisie, a veterinarian-in-training, is sensible; Nell is intuitive, the most in tune with her mother. She shares Lara’s fanciful streak and sometimes wears lipstick to go cherry picking. Musing about whether to pursue an argument with one of her daughters, Lara thinks, “I will always be afraid of waking up the part of Emily that has long been dormant. I will always be afraid of accidentally breaking something in Nell that is fragile and pure. But Maisie is up for it; no one will ever worry about Maisie.”

In other words, the ingredients have been assembled for a wistful meditation on mothers and daughters learning to handle the seasons of their lives. “Tom Lake” guides Lara to equanimity and closure, mostly by awakening her to the value of the people around her. Here, as in much of Patchett’s work, togetherness compensates for loss; being with others, even if they’re not exactly the others you wanted and you’re not with them in exactly the right way, is a genuine form of flourishing.

But the novel’s alchemical transformation of pain into peace feels, at times, overstated. In “Bel Canto,” gunfire interrupted the harmony Patchett painstakingly built between terrorists and captives. “Tom Lake” softens such dissonance. Lara doesn’t just acquiesce to her second act; she discovers that the convergence of motherhood, lockdown, and fruit harvesting has created “the happiest time of my life.” The interlude, she thinks, is “joy itself.” (Nell’s opinion: “I want to get the hell out of this orchard.”) For Lara, the farm is not an earthly place; its red-and-white fields ripple with magic. Amid a “pointillist’s dream” of fruit trees, she can play all her roles at once, reënacting her glory days at Tom Lake, parenting her grown children, and indulging the maternal prerogative of steering the family narrative. Lara sees the selves she’s shed throughout her life jumbled and reallocated among her daughters. Nell shares her “naturalness” onstage, “an ability to be so transparent it’s impossible to turn your eyes away.” Emily, her most difficult child, she construes as a fugitive piece of her own soul: “No matter how many years ago I’d stopped playing Emily, she is still here.” The farm holds, or has held, or will hold, all the people Lara loves. It even encompasses a graveyard—with tangled daisies, a “pretty iron fence,” and “benevolent shade”—where generations of Joe’s family are buried. The Nelsons “resting beneath the mossy slabs . . . had never wanted to be anywhere else,” Lara thinks, projecting her bliss upon the dead.

“Tom Lake” collects enchanted places, sites of congregation like the lake and the stage, or like Chekhov’s cherry orchard and the town in “Our Town.” Patchett suggests that in these timeless locales, with their renewable springs of ghostly personae, characters can safely warehouse past versions of themselves and others. Or at least that’s the idea. Rather than fear the cemetery, Lara and her kids love it and its promise of “everlasting inclusion.” As a girl, Emily “liked to run her fingers along the tombstones, the letters worn nearly to nothing, the stones speckled with lichen.” Lara herself “would lie in the grass between the graves, so pregnant with Maisie I wondered if I’d be able to get up again, and Emily would weave back and forth between the granite slabs, hiding then leaping out to make me laugh.”

As “Tom Lake” goes on, the determined positivity begins to feel slightly menacing, or at least constrictive. Is Lara really that happy? Or is she hiding inside the myth of her happiness to avoid confronting her daughters’ unhappiness and her own shortcomings as a parent? I was tempted into a paranoid reading of the three Nelson girls, scanning for covert signs of distress. Nell, like her mother, dreams of the stage, but she is stuck wearing sad quarantine lipstick, thumbing through plays in her bedroom at night, and practicing lines with her friends over Zoom. Dependable Maisie is always off to deliver a litter of puppies or tend to a calf with diarrhea. Was she forced to grow up too soon? Meanwhile, Emily declares her intention not to procreate. Her decision is a poignant nod to climate change, but it could also be glossed as a salvo against a controlling parent.

Ultimately, though, the novel endorses Lara’s rosy perspective. The girls gratefully receive the tale of Tom Lake—“I’m not sorry to know,” Maisie assures her mom—and the family draws closer. With cherries harvested and blessings scattered, the cast convenes joyfully in the cemetery. Lara thinks, “There is room up here for all of us.” The scene seems oddly unreal, like plastic flowers on a grave. Yet there’s something subversively wise and self-aware about the book’s investment in its own fantasy. “Tom Lake,” the fiction, seems conscious of its status as a magical place, a locus of gentle make-believe. Even as Patchett validates Lara’s performance of contentment, she appears to know that behind the artifice lies a more complicated truth. The same might be said of the graveyard itself, with its friendly daisies and eternally fulfilled ancestors. Strip away the props: there, perhaps, is Forest Lawn cemetery, in Los Angeles, where Patchett and her father were briefly resurrected into one another’s lives. ♦

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‘Tom Lake’ Finds Ann Patchett in a Chekhovian Mood

This time the celebrated novelist spins the cozy tale of a former actress, her three daughters and their rueful memories. There’s a cherry orchard, too.

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By Alexandra Jacobs

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Are you in possession of a hammock? A creaky old porch swing? A bay window with built-in seating? If not, Ann Patchett’s new novel, “Tom Lake,” will situate you there mentally. I wouldn’t be surprised if it put your fitness tracker on the fritz, even if you amble around listening to Meryl Streep read the audio version.

This author is such a decorated and beloved figure in American letters — spinning out novels , memoirs and essays like so many multicolored silks; opening an independent bookstore in Nashville to fight the Amazon anaconda; even helping care for Tom Hanks’s cancer-stricken personal assistant — that I sometimes think of her as Aunt Patchett.

Patchett’s actual family of origin was complicated, as she made explicit after the 2016 publication of the semi-autobiographical “ Commonwealth .” “ The Dutch House ” (2019), which had a wicked stepmother, did not stray far from the idea that living with relatives can be messy and hellish.

With “Tom Lake,” she treats us — and perhaps herself — to a vision of a family beautifully, bucolically simple: nuclear, in its pre-bomb meaning.

Like some guardian angel in the sky, Anton Chekhov hovers over this story, which features three sisters in their 20s and is set on their parents’ cherry orchard (albeit in northern Michigan during the recent pandemic, not the tuberculosis- torn Russian provinces). But Thornton Wilder is driving the tractor.

Sequestered not unhappily in lockdown, the sisters’ mother, Lara (she dropped a “u” after reading “Doctor Zhivago”), is telling them, after tiring days in the field, about her long-ago, short-lived career as an actress, whose highlight was starring as Emily Gibbs , the tragic heroine of Wilder’s enduringly popular piece of Americana, “Our Town.”

In flashbacks we learn she played Emily in both high school and college in New Hampshire, also home to the play’s fictional Grover’s Corners. Then, after a brief and disorienting detour to Hollywood, she returns to the role in summer stock at a theater company, the titular Tom Lake, that happened to be nearish the orchard.

“Even hawking Diet Dr Pepper I was Emily, because she was the only thing I knew how to do,” Lara realized after starting rehearsals to play Mae in Sam Shepard ’s rather less innocent “ Fool for Love .” “I had the range of a box turtle. I was excellent, as long as no one moved me.” Emily is as important to her as Barbie, apparently, was to so many others: a character so formative, she provides the name for Lara’s firstborn.

Lara’s Emily doesn’t aspire to be an actress — that particular affliction has befallen the youngest daughter, Nell, named for Lara’s seamstress grandmother — but she is powerfully fixated on her mother’s former co-star and ex-boyfriend: one Peter Duke, who played Emily Webb’s father at Tom Lake.

“Duke,” as everyone calls him, goes on to become a huge celebrity, enchanting the kiddies in a movie musical called “The Popcorn King,” singing and dancing on a floor covered with kernels, then becoming a Serious Actor, winning an Oscar and inevitably descending into addiction. As a teen, Lara’s Emily grows convinced he, not Lara’s hardworking fruit-farmer husband, was her father, and Patchett drops in enough subtle commonalities — their hair, a certain physical rubberiness (“whoever installed her interior compass put the magnet in upside down”) — that the reader is left in genuine suspense about whether it’s true.

But the larger theme is that it may not matter: Our children inherit the full range of our experience, as much as genetic traits.

“Tom Lake” isn’t a prudish novel — the flashbacks are to the 1980s, when parents hovered a lot less — but it is a resolutely folksy, cozy one, a thing of pies and quilts and nettlesome goats and a middle child named Maisie after a great-aunt. (Lara, in her late 50s up there in rural Michigan, is a demographic anomaly, leaving so many of her old friends in the deep fog of memory without trying to hunt them down on Facebook.) Nell senior had a sewing business and countrified sayings appear here like dropped stitches. You could have knocked me over with a feather!Idle hands? We all know whose workshop they are. You “can’t swing a cat” without hitting a castle, in Scotland.Two performances of Wilder’s Stage Manager are “as different as chalk and cheese.”

But Patchett is also, as always, slyly needlepointing her own pillowcase mottos. “There is no explaining this simple truth about life: You will forget much of it.” “Sweet cherries must be picked today and every day until they’re gone.” “Swimming is the reset button.” This last spoken by a lithe and beautiful Black character named Pallace — whose integration into the theatrical utopia seems just a tad too easy.

“Tom Lake” is a quiet and reassuring book, not a rabble-rouser. It’s highly conscious of Emily Gibbs’s speech about human failure to appreciate the little things, the Stage Manager’s line about the earth “ straining away all the time to make something of itself,” and of the ravages to that earth. Domestic contentment is its North Star, generational continuity its reliable moon. Only a cynic could resist lying down on a nice soft blanket to marvel at Patchett’s twinkling planetarium.

TOM LAKE | By Ann Patchett | 320 pp. | HarperCollins | $30

An earlier version of this article misidentified the relative after whom Maisie was named. It was a great-aunt, not a grandmother.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at [email protected] . Learn more

Alexandra Jacobs is a book critic and the author of “Still Here: The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch.” More about Alexandra Jacobs

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2023

New York Times Bestseller

by Ann Patchett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2023

Poignant and reflective, cementing Patchett’s stature as one of our finest novelists.

It’s time to harvest the cherries from their Michigan orchard, but the pandemic means that Joe Nelson; his wife, Lara; and their daughters, Emily, Maisie, and Nell, must pick all the fruit themselves.

To lighten the lengthy, grueling workdays, and prompted by the recent death of world-famous actor Peter Duke, the girls press Lara to tell them about her romance with Duke at Tom Lake, a summer stock company in Michigan, and her decision to give up acting after one big movie role. Lara’s reminiscences, peppered by feisty comments from her daughters and periodic appearances by her gentle, steadfast husband, provide the foundation for Patchett’s moving portrait of a woman looking back at a formative period in her life and sharing some—but only some—of it with her children. Duke flashes across her recollections as a wildly talented, nakedly ambitious, and extremely crazy young man clearly headed for stardom, but the real interest in this portion of the novel lies in Patchett’s delicate delineation of Lara’s dawning realization that, fine as she is as Emily in Our Town , she has a limited talent and lacks the drive that propels Duke and her friend and understudy Pallas. The fact that Pallas, who's Black, doesn’t get the break that Duke does is one strand in Patchett’s intricate and subtle thematic web, which also enfolds the nature of storytelling, the evolving dynamics of a family, and the complex interaction between destiny and choice. Lara’s daughters are standouts among the sharply dawn characterizations: once-volatile Emily, now settled down to be the heir apparent to the farm; no-nonsense veterinarian-in-training Maisie; and Nell, the aspiring actor and unerring observer who anticipates every turn in her mother’s tale. Patchett expertly handles her layered plot, embedding one charming revelation and one brutal (but in retrospect inevitable) betrayal into a dual narrative that deftly maintains readers’ interest in both the past and present action. These braided strands culminate in a denouement at once deeply sad and tenderly life-affirming.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023

ISBN: 9780063327528

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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PERSPECTIVES

SEEN & HEARD

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring  passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the  Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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‘Tom Lake’ Review: Ann Patchett’s Latest Novel Is A Warm Hug

Ann Patchett’s “Tom Lake” may very well be the first pandemic novel that anyone actually likes. Set among the cherry trees of northern Michigan in the summer of 2020, narrator and protagonist Lara tells her three 20-something-aged daughters a story of the time she dated a movie star named Peter Duke — while avoiding any hint of cringe. Whether it’s Patchett’s ever-prodigious touch or the story’s determined wholesomeness, her ninth novel is reflective and mellow, though by no means prudish — it recounts a hot summer fling, after all. Most of all, it’s rich with the kind of devastatingly real depictions of humanity that readers have come to expect from Patchett.

While in the present day, Lara and her family deal with the daily hard work of the cherry farm (short a few hands because of the pandemic), the young, 24-year-old Lara in her story-within-a-story has an irritatingly perfect life. Discovered by a producer at a high school production of “Our Town,” she goes on to star in a movie, and then to perform in “Our Town” again during summer stock at the eponymous Tom Lake. It’s there that she meets Duke, a then-unknown actor who sweeps her off her feet within the first hour. It’s one of those loves that flares bright but short, and while it yanks the reader along in whirlwind fashion, the mature Lara and her family are the ones who provide the novel’s layers of reflective insight.

Lara’s daughter Emily, named after the character her mother played in “Our Town,” has the frightening intensity of strong-willed eldest daughters, and Lara’s memories of Emily’s years of teenage “hormonal rage” paint a complex and heartbreaking portrait of parent-child relations. Though becoming convinced that your favorite movie star is your true biological father in a fit of delusion might not be a universal teenage experience, the hurt that Emily causes her parents and family is still utterly piercing. Even years later, Lara admits that she is “still somewhat afraid of her.”

Furthermore, it’s through Nell, the youngest and only daughter who inherited Lara’s desire for the stage, that the reader comprehends the significance of a central event in Lara’s story: When she ruptures her Achilles tendon midway through the run of “Our Town.” Although the injury itself isn’t career-ending, this marks the beginning of Lara’s disillusionment with the industry (and with Duke) and the end of her acting career. “While her sisters stare uncomprehending, Nell sobs against [her mother’s] chest,” understanding, as the only other performer in the family, that Lara didn’t go on stage again that summer. It’s an absolutely devastating moment, made even more poignant by Nell’s parallel grief. While Lara has ended her career — and mostly by choice — young Nell, who wants it so badly, has yet to begin. Even worse, she’s losing precious time to the pandemic while she is “beautiful and young in a profession that cares for nothing but beauty and youth.” In these moments, one thinks Patchett must have lived a thousand lives to understand where the keystones of human experience and emotion lie, and then to describe them so adeptly, so accurately.

Though Patchett gets this crucial moment just right, there are moments where the novel falters. Emily voices some climate anxieties in a rather sudden and jarring way, and the girls protest their parents’ occasionally “un-woke” habits in lines that feel added-on. Attempts to comment on race concern Pallace, Lara’s understudy and best friend at Tom Lake, who is seemingly the only Black character in the book. The fact that Pallace ostensibly doesn’t make it to Hollywood, unlike Duke and Lara (who are both white), seems a realistic and quiet nod to the realities of theater — yet it still feels like a half-baked attempt to talk about race.

“Tom Lake” manages to feel both wandering and organic, while maintaining a neatly progressing arc of realizations. But it’s almost too neat: The reader slowly starts to make connections — recognizing the origins of each daughter’s name, recognizing their father, and their home, all within Lara’s dream-like story. Her husband, too, is miraculously never uncomfortable with this deep dive into his wife’s past love. But what kind of pandemic novel would it be if it wasn’t a little escapist? In fact, perhaps what makes this novel so agreeable despite being set in 2020 is that it captures not just the small, hidden, somewhat guilty pleasures of being trapped at home with family, but also both narrates and embodies the longing for escapism — for stories of levity, happiness, and joy.

Though it doesn’t shy from revealing moments of human suffering and sorrow, “Tom Lake” ultimately chooses cheeriness and heart, leaving readers feeling snug and content.

—Staff writer Sara Komatsu can be reached at [email protected] .

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clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

Ann Patchett’s latest, ‘Tom Lake,’ reminds us why she’s beloved

The new novel from the author of such books as ‘The Dutch House’ and ‘Bel Canto’ explores love in its many forms

So many books about love are actually about heartbreak. Ann Patchett’s new novel, “ Tom Lake ,” is not. “Tom Lake” is about romantic love, marital love and maternal love, but also the love of animals, the love of stories, love of the land and trees and the tiny, red, cordiform object that is a cherry. Not that a heart is not broken at some point, but it breaks without affecting the remarkable warmth of the book, set in summer’s fullest bloom.

Earlier this year, Patchett received the National Humanities Medal for, among other contributions to the literary world, her ability to put “ into words the beauty, pain, and complexity of human nature .” This generous writer hits the mark again with her ninth novel.

“Tom Lake” revolves around a central love story, one that Lara Kenison tells her three daughters, Emily, Maisie and Nell, in installments over the long, strange summer of 2020 on the family-run cherry farm in Michigan. It is the story of her affair with a famous actor named Peter Duke, which took place when both were in summer stock at Tom Lake, Mich., when Lara was just 19 years old. The girls have heard parts of it before, but this time they’re getting the full account. Lara starts at the very beginning, when she played Emily in a community theater production of “Our Town,” which led to a brief career in Hollywood and then a reprise of the role of Emily at Tom Lake. Duke, a handsome hunk on the runway to a huge career, was playing Editor Webb, her father.

As did many a mother during the coronavirus years, Lara is enjoying the pandemic-driven return of her girls to their mother’s arms. “All three of our girls are home now. Emily came back to the farm after she graduated from college, while Maisie and Nell, still in school, returned in March.” And while the girls are anxiously following the nightly news, their mother’s feelings about the pandemic are mixed. She can’t “pretend that all of us being together doesn’t fill me with joy. I understand that joy is inappropriate these days and still, we feel what we feel.”

Though mothers have been important characters in a couple of Patchett novels (“ The Magician’s Assistant ” comes to mind), “Tom Lake” is her first with a narrator who is a mother — a mother whose maternal role and emotions are at the core of who she is.

This is interesting in light of Patchett’s real-life feelings about motherhood. As she wrote in “There Are No Children Here,” a striking essay from her 2021 collection , “ These Precious Days ,” “Part of not wanting children has always been the certainty that I didn’t have the energy for it, and so I had to make a choice, the choice between children and writing.”

That’s one of the nice things about fiction writing, though — there’s plenty of opportunity to become someone else, make different choices and explore a different life, in this case someone with three beloved daughters. “Emily is tall like her father, strong enough to hoist full lugs all day long. Maisie is smaller than her older sister, though by no means small, and her curls give her extra stature. Nell is like me, or Nell is like I was. It’s as if the genetic material from which these girls were made diminished with every effort, so that the eldest daughter is strapping and the middle is middling and the youngest is a wisp.”

Knowing Patchett’s personal history with motherhood makes the fullness of the maternal feelings she imagines for Lara Kenison particularly poignant. In one beautiful passage, Lara comforts her youngest, Nell: “I want to tell her she will never be hurt, that everything will be fair, and that I will always, always be there to protect her. No one sees us but the swallows looping overhead. She puts her arms around my waist and we stand there, just like that, casting a single shadow across the grass.”

A single shadow across the grass — as if one’s child could be part of you again, the way they were in the first place.

Though Lara tells her husband, Joe, that she’s leaving out “the good parts” from this version of the tale — “By which you mean sex,” says Joe — there’s no way to tell the story without giving a general sense of the heat between Peter Duke and Lara, so hot that it crept into their portrayal of father and daughter onstage.

The two of them become half of a foursome when Peter’s tennis-pro brother, Sebastian, begins dating Pallas, a Black dancer from the company, and eventually things get complicated. And things get broken. And Peter and Lara are shot out the other side of their headlong romance, into their individual futures.

It’s interesting to think about “Tom Lake” alongside “ Bel Canto ,” the prizewinning 2001 novel that was Patchett’s breakout. From a distance they seem so different, one about a hostage situation in South America complete with guns and violence, and the other about a family on a farm in Michigan. Except that because of the pandemic, the family is also in a kind of hostage situation — a suspension of ordinary life. And both stories are fundamentally about how love begins, and what happens to it after that.

Ann Patchett’s wisdom about love has run though all of her novels and nonfiction books, including the great “ Truth and Beauty ” and “ This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage .” As soon as you finish “Tom Lake,” you should go back and read them all.

Marion Winik, host of the NPR podcast “ The Weekly Reader ,” is the author of numerous books, including “ First Comes Love ” and “ The Big Book of the Dead .”

by Ann Patchett

Harper. 330 pp. $30

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Tom Lake: A Novel

• By Ann Patchett
• Reviewed by Jennifer Bort Yacovissi
• August 16, 2023

This story centers on a happy family but still the pages fly by.

Ann Patchett has long been one of my all-time favorite writers. When her latest novel arrived in my mailbox, I ripped into the package like an over-sugared toddler on Christmas morning and — despite having a stack of more deadline-driven reading to do — promptly dove into Tom Lake .

What’s unique for me personally about Patchett is that we’re about the same age and, I sense from her nonfiction, have a similar view of the world. Reading her as she and I approach our seniority is like listening to an old friend tell an engaging story that resonates in particular ways. So, caveat emptor: I was predisposed to enjoy this book.

Tom Lake is the quietest of quiet stories: a mother recounting select elements of her life to her adult daughters as they pick sweet cherries during the pandemic. Quiet, yes, but gorgeous and entrancing in ways significant and minute via the details tucked into the corners.

Emily, Maisie, and Nell are stuck on the farm with their parents, Joe and Lara, as the pandemic rages. Most of their usual seasonal workers, in that first covid summer, can’t make it to northern Michigan for the short, intense harvesting season. Thus, given the work ahead of them to get the crop in, Lara has lots of quality time with her girls, who are clamoring to know the specifics of her early-career romance with famous actor Peter Duke.

Patchett’s rendering of this family captures so much of what is true in daily life and family dynamics — especially of even grown children being incapable of grasping their parents’ life before them — moving easily from laugh-out-loud funny to moist-eyed poignance, sometimes in the same sentence.

The author weaves her story back and forth between Lara’s formative years on stage and screen and her present life of husband, children, a dog, and a vast and demanding orchard (cue the Chekhov references). How Lara went from the one to the other is a central question that keeps the pages turning. The fact that this is a happy, well-adjusted family takes nothing away from the intrinsic drive of the narrative. Lara is telling us the story, too, and she knows how to keep us hooked.

And thus the tale opens: After a morning spent suffering through the auditions for her New Hampshire community’s production of “Our Town,” 16-year-old Laura Kenison impulsively decides that she can do better than that . With a copy of Doctor Zhivago in her bag and the stroke of a pen on her audition form, she becomes Lara, and an actress — or at least the ideal Emily Webb of “Our Town” — is born.

It is her ability to fully inhabit Emily and Emily-like characters that eventually brings Lara, via L.A. and New York, to the summer-stock theater at Tom Lake in Michigan, and immediately into the arms of Peter Duke, a young actor with charm, charisma, and unbalanced impulses to spare:

“We had known each other for a matter of hours, but they were summer-stock hours, which in the outside world would have translated to a solid six months.”

That summer is the heart of the story Lara is telling, peopled with compelling characters — not only Duke but his older, ever-responsible brother, Sebastian, and Pallas, the wickedly talented dancer and actress who is performing in Tom Lake’s production of “Cabaret” while understudying Lara in two roles. The four become two couples, but Duke is always at the center.

“Sebastian’s visits unsettled things,” writes Patchett, “almost as if his calmness allowed Duke to be crazier than he usually was, like a kid who’ll throw himself off of ladders once he knows someone’s there to catch him.” The stage is set.

The first big reveal comes smack in the middle of the book, as Lara recounts the best day of that long-ago summer; savvier readers may guess it ahead of time, but this one did not. Other revelations trickle out as Lara’s story continues, but there are elements that she decides to keep to herself.

A question repeatedly pops up: “ Are you sorry? Don’t you wish? ” That summer, the course of Lara’s life changes in an instant, “like a gunshot I hadn’t heard”; its report echoes through all their lives. But, as Lara confesses to Maisie’s rescue pup, Hazel, when they are alone together, “If this were a movie, I’d be drowning in regret right now. But I’m telling you, Hazel, it doesn’t feel anything like regret. It feels like I just missed getting hit by a train.”

Patchett is known for stories that throw strangers together into confined spaces to see what happens, Bel Canto being the ultimate example. Tom Lake again brings us confinement, both in that summer at the lake and again on the farm. The difference is that the people on the farm aren’t strangers; they are known and deeply beloved to each other, and Lara understands that there is no place she would rather be:

“[O]ne morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.”

Maisie is named for Joe’s aunt, and Nell is named for Lara’s grandmother; perhaps it makes sense that Emily is named after the one character Lara could fully embody, since Lara’s Emily is what put her on her life’s path, the path that made this family — here, together, happy — possible.

Jennifer Bort Yacovissi’s debut novel, Up the Hill to Home , tells the story of four generations of a family in Washington, DC, from the Civil War to the Great Depression. Her short fiction has appeared in Gargoyle and Pen-in-Hand. Jenny reviews regularly for the Independent and serves on its board of directors as president. She has served as chair or program director of the Washington Writers Conference since 2017, and for several recent years was president of the Annapolis chapter of the Maryland Writers’ Association. Stop by Jenny’s website for a collection of her reviews and columns, and follow her on Twitter at @jbyacovissi.

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• Aug 1, 2023, 320 pages
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Book Summary

In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America's finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara's three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew. Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.

That Veronica and I were given keys and told to come early on a frozen Saturday in April to open the school for the Our Town auditions was proof of our dull reliability. The play's director, Mr. Martin, was my grandmother's friend and State Farm agent. That's how I was wrangled in, through my grandmother, and Veronica was wrangled because we did pretty much everything together. Citizens of New Hampshire could not get enough of Our Town . We felt about the play the way other Americans felt about the Constitution or the "Star-Spangled Banner." It spoke to us, made us feel special and seen. Mr. Martin predicted a large turnout for the auditions, which explained why he needed use of the school gym for the day. The community theater production had nothing to do with our high school, but seeing as how Mr. Martin was also the principal's insurance agent and very likely his friend, the request was granted. Ours was that kind of town. We arrived with our travel mugs of coffee and thick ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• For what reasons is Our Town , the play by Thornton Wilder, significant and lasting? What about the play made Lara say that it "spoke to us, made us feel special and seen"? When Lara says, "ours was that kind of town," what might she mean?
• What issues explored in Our Town are particularly relevant to this novel, Tom Lake ?
• What's the significance of Laura changing the spelling of her name to Lara, after the character in Doctor Zhivago ? In what ways are personal names powerful and important or not?
• A young Lara believes that watching the untalented adults from town audition for the play—"the awkward way these men held their bodies," "seeing adults stumble and fail,"—was "the first day of [her] true education." What might she mean by ...
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Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.

I couldn't believe how easy it was to get into the book and absorbed in Lara's story. As a writer myself, I took a lot of notes about Patchett's style here. Rather than crafting shimmering passages that call attention to her skill, Patchett's gift is to make herself disappear so we can better connect with the characters. The events of Lara's life flow perfectly together, which makes it exciting when we learn how she goes from swimming with a movie star to owning a cherry orchard with a husband and kids. Also, that's really how life is: we never know if a single moment will turn out to be important or not, or when we'll see someone for the last time, or how what we will come to learn about them in future will change how we see the past... continued

(Reviewed by Erin Lyndal Martin ).

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Thornton wilder (1897-1975) and our town.

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