Tom Lake

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

Fiction

2023 Harper

Finished on August 17, 2023

Rating: 5/5 (Excellent!)

Publisher's Blurb:

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.

"Patchett’s intricate and subtle thematic web…enfolds the nature of storytelling, the evolving dynamics of a family, and the complex interaction between destiny and choice….These braided strands culminate in a denouement at once deeply sad and tenderly life-affirming. Poignant and reflective, cementing Patchett’s stature as one of our finest novelists." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

I'm not sure if I know how to review this marvelous novel! I loved the entire book, savoring each sentence, and as the final pages drew near, I told my husband that I hated to say goodbye to Patchett's characters; they felt so real! The book could have been a thousand pages and it wouldn't have been long enough.

To begin, I'm very happy that I decided to get a copy of Our Town to read in advance of starting Tom Lake. Somehow, I managed to go through life without ever reading Our Town. I've also never seen the play, but had a vague idea of its premise. I suppose one could read Tom Lake without knowing a thing about Thornton Wilder's classic, but it's a much richer experience knowing the role of the actors, and how they influenced Patchett's story.

Not only does Ann Patchett create memorable characters who feel like family, she also paints a beautiful image of the setting....

Tom Lake turned out to be crushingly pretty. There was a huge covered amphitheater sunk into the rolling lawns. The musical ran in the amphitheater. They also had a black box theater where they staged the straight plays like Our Town and Fool for Love. There were tennis courts with a clubhouse that served iced tea and sandwiches. A smattering of lovely houses--some that had been turned into administrative offices, some for boarding the actors and designers and technicians, and some where regular people spent the summer--spread along the shore of a tremendous lake. Fruit trees bloomed, paths meandered, hills swelled, like someone had clipped pictures out of a pile of magazines and then glued the very best ones together on a single page. A couple of miles away was a small town that took most of its annual revenue from the summer tourists who came to stay in one of the two hotels, have supper, and spend the next morning wandering through the little shops before coming over with their theater tickets. The most ambitious ones walked in for a show then caught a shuttle bus back. They wore Tom Lake T-shirts and Tom Lake hats as they paddled rented canoes past the diving platform and out across the lake. The whole thing was a fragile ecosystem, as small towns and theater companies usually are, but as far as I could see it was thriving.

I also love this gem of a passage:

There's 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 scatted 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. 

and

“We clump together in our sorrow. In joy we may wander off in our separate directions, but in sorrow we prefer to hold hands.” 

I know that Tom Lake is a book I'll read again, and I'm eager to listen to the audio production, which is narrated by the ever-so-talented Meryl Streep!

I also can't wait to return to Nashville, not only to see my daughter and son-in-law, but to pay another visit to Parnassus Books. Maybe I'll get to meet my favorite author face-to-face!

This is one you'll hug to your chest, whispering "Great book! Bravo." Highly recommend.

This made my day!