Review of TOM LAKE by Ann Patchett

  4 Stars

This reflective novel highlights Patchett’s storytelling skills.  I loved it.

Lara and her husband Joe own a cherry orchard in Michigan.  Because of the pandemic lockdown, their three daughters are home and helping to bring in the harvest.  To help pass the hours of grueling work, the girls beg their mother to tell the story of her relationship with Peter Duke, a famous actor.  Slowly Lara tells them of her short career as an actress and her romance with Duke when she was 24 and starring as Emily in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in a summer stock theatre in Tom Lake. 

Though all three daughters have bought into the mythology of Duke, they have very different personalities.  Emily, 26, has studied horticulture and has decided she will take over the family business; she has a fiery temperament.  Maisie, 24, is studying to be a veterinarian; her pragmatism is what stands out.  Nell, 22, is studying drama in hopes of becoming an actress; she is very intuitive, always anticipating what comes next in her mother’s story. 

The three young women think that they know their mother, but as Lara narrates her backstory, they come to see her not just as a loving and protective mother but as a complex human being who had a very different life when she was their age.  They come to understand that she had desires like they do, but that she also has experienced loss.  Of course, their views of Duke also change:  he’s not just the handsome and charismatic world-famous actor they have read about and seen in films. 

Initially, the daughters expect that their mother regrets giving up a glamourous life as an actress.  Lara, however, has no such regrets:  “’You wake up one day and you don’t want the carnival anymore.  In fact, you can’t even believe you did that.’”  She even confides, “’it doesn’t feel anything like regret.  It feels like I just missed getting hit by a train.’”  I love her comment, “’Look at [the beauty of the trees]!  Look at the three of you.  You think my life would have been better spent making commercials for lobster rolls?’” 

The daughters also think that their mother’s romance with Duke was such a pivotal event that they can only wonder “’How do you ever get over someone like that?’”  But Lara seldom thinks about Duke.  She sees the summer of 1988 as her coming-of-age season, a summer that taught her a great deal.  Though “most of those lessons I would have gladly done without,” she realizes that it also brought her Joe, the farm, and three daughters.  She was betrayed and wounded, but she has left any sorrow or anger behind.  I love her statement that “The past need not be so all-encompassing that it renders us incapable of making egg salad.”

Lara concludes, “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 also get knocked aside as well.”  I certainly agree with her comment that “we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.”

The play Our Town, which was central to Lara’s life as an actress, has as its theme the idea that people do not appreciate what life has to offer.  It is the ordinary things in life that often go unnoticed that are the most important.  Lara has taken this lesson to heart.  She is content with her life in the present; she is grateful for her life.  Beauty and suffering exist together:  they are living through a pandemic, “this unparalleled disaster,” that has overturned their lives, but she also thinks of this as “the happiest time of my life [because] Joe and I are here on this farm, our three girls grown and gone and then returned, all of us working together to take the cherries off the trees.”

The passage of time is inevitable, as are loss, suffering, and death, but there is beauty in even the most ordinary of lives and loves.  This life-affirming message is timely and it is delivered in a beautiful story told in beautiful prose - a tale of gratitude for which to be grateful.