Tom Lake is an absolutely stunning book about love, how you don’t really know your parents, trauma, choice and destiny.
Ann Patchett is one of my favourite writers because she just settles into your brain like no other writer. This book is about a northern Michigan family caught up in the COVID pandemic who have to hunker down to get the cherries off the trees in their orchard. The families of labourers who normally come are not available. And if they don’t get the cherries off then it affects their livelihood. To pass the time, or to get away from the stress of the current time, the 3 grown daughters have asked their mother Lara to tell them about when she was an actress dating the now-famous actor Peter Duke.
What transpires is a beautiful look at the ways we love people, and how that love matures (or doesn’t depending on the person). I also felt that this novel was about the trauma of the pandemic, the existential dread, the what-ifs you ask about your own life.
Lara’s youngest daughter desperately wants to be an actor so she doesn’t understand how Lara stepped away from it all. Lara’s eldest daughter as a teenager truly believed that she was Peter Duke’s daughter and although she’s come around, the mistrust is still there between mother and daughter. And could their father be any kinder a human being? He is the loveliest character of them all, a steady rock throughout. In many ways, this story is about catharsis. For Lara, she is examining a time in her life that is seemingly behind her, but the more she considers the story from her daughters’ points of view, and goes deeper into that time herself, the more it’s clear that this is a past, unresolved trauma. It’s not behind her (yet), but without talking it through, there is no closure.
Ann Patchett is masterful in how she weaves in multiple stories about the different characters, but also brings in the richness of Thorton Wilder’s Our Town and Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Classics that I now must re-read in order to appreciate even more the rich talent on display in this novel.
You don’t need to read Our Town before reading Tom Lake but if you know the play then the novel is an even better read. Undoubtably you will read Our Town after reading Tom Lake so the publishers should really bundle these two together. The opening passage of Our Town still haunts me. It’s a beautiful play about everyday life and what we see (and miss) in the passage of a lifetime. Lara’s acting experience revolts around her role as Emily, and it’s made me appreciate Ann Patchett and Thorton Wilder all the more.
Published by HarperCollins Canada