FICTION
Tom Lake
Ann Patchett
Bloomsbury, $32.99
At first I worried that Tom Lake was going to be a rerun of The Waltons, that folksy 1970s TV series. “Goodnight, John Boy” echoed in my head as I met Laura, a teenager who lands a role in a small-town theatre production in New Hampshire and winds up on a farm in Michigan with a brood of daughters. But this is Ann Patchett, weaver of lifelike human stories so artful that you can never tell where the twisted strands of lightness and dark will lead.
I soon saw that her ninth novel was an all-American version of The Decameron. Or The Magic Mountain, as Patchett wrote in The Getaway Car, a 2011 essay about learning to write: “That novel’s basic plot – a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society in confinement – became the story line for just about everything I’ve ever written.” (She also curses The Brady Bunch, “because all of it stuck”.)
Ann Patchett elevates her novel with rigorous details of character and dialogue, literary allusions and real-world concerns.Credit: Emily Dorio
As Tom Lake opens, Laura is reading Doctor Zhivago and registering actors for a community production of Our Town, Thornton Wilder’s 1938 classic. After watching hopeless auditions, she changes her name to Lara and tries out for the play herself. She plays the key role of Emily with such natural talent that she scores a part in a Hollywood film and seems destined for success.
By this time, we know that Lara is telling the story of her lucky start to her three daughters during a rare family gathering one summer, while they help their parents pick cherries on their orchard. They demand to hear about their mother’s long-ago love affair with another actor, who went on to be famous. Why didn’t she marry the movie star “Duke” instead of their quiet, hard-working father, Joe? The two narratives of then and now unfold in parallel, with the young women realising how little they know of their parents’ lives.
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“You had a ‘u’ in your name?” a daughter asks, in the simplest of many misapprehensions. One or two secrets Lara keeps for herself (and us).
Tom Lake is not a person but a place, the setting for much of the novel, where young Lara reprises her Emily in another production of Our Town and is swept into a hot summer romance with the charismatic Peter Duke. She learns about herself in the confined society of summer-stock theatre, where actors - on the way up or out - perform their hopes and desperation.
What could have been a nostalgic coming-of-age story is elevated by Patchett’s rigorous details of character and dialogue, literary allusions and real-world concerns. Amateur theatre becomes a tragicomic stage for daily life. Scattered daisies are more than pretty faces. You’ll find more meaning if you bone up on Our Town, a standard of American theatre, but the novel contains all you need, if you pay attention.
“It was an anxious spring for the world,” Patchett writes obliquely on page 24, not naming “the pandemic” until page 99. This is her Covid novel, in which she cleverly uses lockdown as a dramatic device to bring the family together for a season of revelations. For Lara, “the present – this unparalleled disaster – is the happiest time of my life”. The novel shifts between 2020 and 1984, the year Lara’s acting career took off – “nothing like what Orwell had envisioned and still it was a world nearly impossible to explain”.
Lara’s daughters act as a chorus to elicit and judge her memories. Each also has an individual purpose: Nell, the actor halted by Covid; Maisie, the lifesaving vet, and Emily, who wants to take over the farm. There are glimmers of Little Women and Little House on the Prairie, and fleeting shadows of The Cherry Orchard and King Lear (why else have three daughters?), but Patchett doesn’t follow anyone else’s script.
Lovers of her writing will wonder how Tom Lake compares with her previous perfect novels about fractured families, Commonwealth and The Dutch House. The seeds of Tom Lake can be traced to another 2011 essay, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, but the novel is less obviously autobiographical than Commonwealth and emotionally warmer than The Dutch House. It perfectly completes a loose (and perhaps unintentional) trilogy with a wholesomeness that reminds us about American decency while refusing to be sentimental.
To say any more would spoil this Russian doll of storytelling, this play within a play within a play. Patchett writes with her usual humanity and time switches so fluid you can’t see the joins. Tom Lake is a reassuring portrait of our plague-time, an antidote to dystopian hysteria, the Patchett novel we need now.
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