“Tom Lake” by Ann Patchett

“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, until one 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.” (Tom Lake, p. 116)

Isolated by the pandemic, the Nolans reunite on the family farm near Traverse City, Michigan, as narrated in Ann Patchett’s latest novel, Tom Lake. The five members of this family are constantly working to keep the farm going, tend their small herd of goats, pick the cherries from their orchard (with fewer than usual hired workers), watch their collection of movies, and remember their past lives. A remarkable feature of the way Patchett tells the story, is that the pandemic is very much in the background; the emphasis is on the relationships of the characters and their day-to-day lives, as well as on the story the three daughters manage to tease out of their mother, Lara.

The three daughters, all in their mid-twenties, have always been curious about their mother’s past, particularly about her life before marrying their father and taking over the farm and orchard from his aunt and uncle — a time long before the girls were born. As Lara tells the story, she also revives untold memories of that time; Patchett interweaves these secret thoughts with the way that Lara tells the story to her daughters.

The dominant theme of Tom Lake seems to be the question “What is happiness?” If this sounds corny, maybe it is. Ann Patchett carries it off with flair and style, in my opinion, making her point through the events and choices of Lara’s life.

Underlying Lara’s entire life before marriage, as she tells it, was her early experience playing the role of Emily in Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town (which is a pretty corny play, but in a good way.) Our Town begins in 1901, and ends in 1913. Emily, the central character, was a small-town girl; she married her high-school sweetheart just after graduation, and died in childbirth at the age of 24. I don’t know if the play is as well-known as it used to be, when almost all American students were assigned to read it at some point in high school English class, but Patchett seems to assume that her readers know it.

Twenty-four is also Lara’s age in the most critical parts of her story, and the age of one of her three daughters; at the time of the novel, she is fifty-seven. In high school and college, Lara didn’t just read Our Town: she played the role of Emily in student productions. Her performance attracted the attention of a movie producer in Hollywood. Then, after making a film, she tried out for the role of Emily in the 1988 Lincoln Center production of Our Town with Spalding Gray — a historic event with real people, inserted into a fictional story, which to me echoes the kind of peculiar real/not real mood that I get from the Thornton Wilder play. 

When Lara doesn’t get the role, she settles for second-best: performing in a summer stock company somewhere in northern Michigan not far from Traverse City in a venue called Tom Lake. Unlike Lincoln Center, this venue is fiction. The Tom Lake theater company and its actors and directors become the center of Lara’s story, including her affair with Duke, her fellow actor in Our Town. This relationship has always obsessed her daughter Emily because Duke went on to be an insanely famous Hollywood actor. Lara, on the other hand, went on to be several low-profile things, and eventually married Joe Nolan, who had been the director of the summer-stock plays and then had inherited the family farm. 

Patchett  sets up a major contrast between the glamorous and high-profile Hollywood or New York life that Lara and Joe rejected and the hard work and deep satisfaction of their lives on the farm. The book is almost preachy with its message of happiness, but you have to read it to see how amazingly Patchett avoids any sentimentality, and how solidly she makes that point. And to me, how much better she manages to do this than Thornton Wilder did. 

Wilder isn’t the only literary figure in the novel. The actors in the summer stock company are also putting on two other modern plays, and there are constant parallels to another rural play: The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov. As the New York Times reviewer puts it: 

“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.”

I feel as if I have a whole reading list of plays to read before I should really write this review of Patchett’s highly enjoyable book, but I don’t think that’s really necessary. It’s a great book on its own.

Review © 2023 mae sander