Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett

(2023, Harper Collins)

So much recent fiction seems devoted to depicting the evils of slavery or racism, or the sufferings people endure from parental abuse, addiction, or gender prejudice, that a book about a loving family seems escapist. But Tom Lake isn’t escapist, though its characters are almost all heterosexual white people and its central family members are happy with their lives. It’s a story told by a mother to her three adult daughters, who have gathered on the family farm to help pick cherries in the first panic of Covid; it concerns her life before they were born.

As young girls the daughters were enthralled to learn that their mother, Lara, once “dated” an extremely famous movie star in the days when both were unknown actors. Now they want to hear the whole story of that romance, and to understand why their mother gave up acting and their father gave up a flourishing career as a director to run the cherry farm that has lasted for five generations in their father’s family. The story revolves around Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town, for it starts when Lara, then 16, on the impulse of a moment auditions for the part of Emily in a local amateur production. Later, in college, she is seen playing that same role by a Hollywood producer who chances to be there, and who recruits her for an ingenue role in a movie. Because release of the movie is delayed indefinitely, he suggests she try for the role of Emily in a Broadway production of Our Town. Denied that role because the backers want a famous star, she is recommended for the role in a production at a summer theater, Tom Lake, which she had never heard of. It is there that she meets the great star- to-be, playing Emily’s father. We realize that the novel is about the role of chance and choice in a life that has started by escaping from a small New Hampshire town not unlike the one in the play.

The novel is also about the different kinds of love—wildly romantic, deep and enduring, self interested, manipulative - love for children, love for parents and grandparents and friends, love for a place, a landscape. In a sense, this is also the theme of Our Town, whose enduring popularity must be based, at least in part, on our collective nostalgia for its picture of a simpler, closer, American life based on firm values and kindly tolerance. Tom Lake asks to what extent that picture has any relevance to our lives today, in a time not only of Covid, which might be transient, but also of the climate change that permeates our world and may be our greatest danger.

Readers of Patchett’s other novels will know that she writes very well, with no obvious flourishes and a fine ear for speech. Her principle characters in this novel are well-conceived, complex, sometimes surprising. It’s an unusual work for our time, and in many ways comforting.