“It might not sound like much but it cost me everything.” Lara Kenison, a former actor in her 50s and the narrator of Ann Patchett’s new novel, Tom Lake, relates the story of her brief career to her three adult daughters while they’re marooned on the family cherry tree farm in Michigan during the pandemic.
Towards the end of the book, when Lara is done sifting through the past, she has the above realisation, keenly but quietly felt. Fans of Patchett will recognise the style, the kind of story that offers an engrossing, utterly convincing meditation on life, the hairpin twists and turns that are often only apparent in the rear-view mirror.
Tom Lake is classic Patchett, focusing on family dynamics, legacy, marriage, first loves, all of it related in simple, fluent prose, with plenty of intrigue: “Things happened to me, but not on that day, and not like that.” Lara frequently breaks into interior monologues, making the reader privy to events and emotions she deems unsuitable for her daughters and her beloved husband, Joe. This gives us the feeling of being on the inside track, another staple of Patchett’s, the behind-the-scenes thrill of hearing the real story.
With her clever use of the pandemic to create a closed-off environment of long, repetitive days, Lara has a captive audience in her daughters Emily, Maisie and Nell, who pester their mother for her history, desperate to be entertained and to get respite from the endless farm work of harvesting cherries: “I don’t remember ever looking at my mother this way, like I could eat her down to the bone then wipe my bloody mouth on her hair.”
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[ The Dutch House: Ann Patchett’s career-defining masterpieceOpens in new window ]
Patchett explores the human need for stories, especially in the bad times, and the way in which storytelling is linked to identity and legacy, to the secrets we keep from others, the secrets we keep from ourselves. The smart ending particularly reinforces this idea, underlining how children can often intuit things they’ll never learn or come to understand: “I look at my girls, my brilliant young women. I want them to think I was better than I was, and I want to tell them the truth in case the truth will be useful. Those two desires do not neatly coexist, but this is where we are in the story.”
While the timeline of the past could be clearer at the beginning – we don’t get the year of 1988 until late in the narrative – the reader is wholly involved in the story from the outset, another eager daughter waiting for the reveals. Most of the action centres on Lara’s stint at a summer stock acting troupe in Michigan when she’s in her mid-20s and her love affair with up-and-coming actor Peter Duke, who plays her father in the troupe’s production of Our Town.
Lara is reprising the role of Emily, a part she has already nailed in school and college productions, excelling so much that it led to a role in a Hollywood movie, due to come out after the summer. What happens at Tom Lake in those few short months changes the trajectory of her life. Her daughters, and by proxy the reader, form the jury who will decide the verdict at the end of her tale: tragedy or happy ever after?
Often compared to writers such as John Irving and Anne Tyler, Patchett also has a lot in common with Elizabeth Strout
Patchett is the author of eight novels and four works of nonfiction. Her previous novel, The Dutch House, was a New York Times and Sunday Times best-seller, and longlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize. She has won the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and her work has been translated into more than 30 languages.
Often compared to writers such as John Irving and Anne Tyler, Patchett also has a lot in common with Elizabeth Strout, particularly the Lucy Barton series, the tone that manages to be at once uplifting and elegiac. There are similarities in the cadences of the voice, too, and in Lara’s careful observations: “There always seemed to be one girl who wanted nothing but to crawl into my lap for an hour while the other two were away. And so I would hold her. You don’t forget that, even if your daughters have grown and been gone for years and then come home.”
The family realm in Tom Lake is further enlivened by the contrasting world of the actors – transient, frenetic, debauched, which is to say intensely intriguing. From the tenacity of the dancers to the beleaguered costume woman, the alcohol and drug abuse, the backdrop is beguiling and brilliantly real. In Tom Lake, Patchett gives us a woman looking back on a startling introduction to adult life, in search of the glittering past: “The brain is a remarkable thing, what’s lost snaps right into focus and you’ve done nothing at all.”
