Excerpt from Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Mr. Saxon," Mr. Martin called out. "You'll be reading the beginning of the second act." All the Stage Managers would be reading the beginning of the second act.

That I could hear the light shuffle of Mr. Saxon's footsteps crossing the stage surprised me. "I'm first?" Mr. Saxon had failed to consider that this would be the outcome of arriving at a high school gym half an hour before the doors opened.

"You, sir, are the first," Mr. Martin said. "Please begin when you're ready."

And so Mr. Saxon cleared his throat and, after waiting a full minute longer than what would have been merely awkward, he began. "Three years have gone by," he said. "Yes, the sun's come up over a thousand times."

I continued to face the lobby as I had all morning, though now those two sets of double doors were closed. Mr. Martin and my grandmother and the people sitting with them were far away, their backs to me, my back to them, and poor Mr. Saxon, who was dying a terrible death up there, was doubtlessly looking at the director and not the back of a high school girl. Still, as a courtesy, I did not turn around. He went all the way to the end of the page. "There! You can hear the 5:45 for Boston," he said finally, his voice flooded with relief. The reading lasted two minutes and I wondered how anyone could have thought it wise to have picked such a long passage.

"Thank you very much," Mr. Martin said, his voice devoid of encouragement.

Such a sadness welled in me. If Veronica had been there we would have played a silent game of hangman, adding a limb for every word Mr. Saxon hit too plaintively. We would have refused to look at each other for fear of laughing. But Veronica was in the hallway, and no one had come in late the way we'd been so sure they would. As it turned out, the auditioners had all had the same idea: arrive promptly, register, and stand in line as directed—thus proving themselves to be good at taking direction. Mr. Martin called out for the second hopeful, Mr. Parks.

"Should I start at the top of the page where it's marked?" Mr. Parks asked.

"That would be just fine," Mr. Martin said.

"Three years have gone by," Mr. Parks said, and then waited three years in order to underscore the point. "Yes." He paused again. "The sun's come up over a thousand times."

Mr. Parks was playing to Maine, not New Hampshire. Were I to turn around I no doubt would have seen a man in a yellow slicker, a lobster tucked beneath his arm. Silently, I reached into the backpack hanging from my chair and felt for my copy of Doctor Zhivago. This had always been the plan: they would audition and I would read, and when we got bored Veronica and I would swap our posts so she could read. Mr. Parks was nowhere near the end of the page. The good thing about Doctor Zhivago was that the plot was sufficiently convoluted so as to require all of my brain. I didn't much like the novel but I wanted to see what would happen to Lara. Still, by the sixth time some aspiring Stage Manager announced that the sun had come up, I realized Pasternak was no match for my circumstances and I turned my chair around.

One after the other, the Stage Managers walked out onto the proscenium and began. The awkward ways these men held their bodies, and how the paper trembled in their hands, were things no high school girl should ever see. Some of them had decent voices, but tip them off the side of a boat and they would go down like anchors. Zero buoyancy. Others were okay in their bodies, pacing around with one hand stuffed in a pocket, but they sounded out each word phonetically. The dichotomy was neck-up neck-down: Some had one and some had the other, but no one managed both and several managed neither. Put together, the Stage Managers were a car crash, a multiple-vehicle pileup, and I could not look away.

Despite all evidence, it was nearly springtime in New Hampshire. My junior year was seven weeks from its completion but I kept thinking that this was the first day of my true education. None of the books I'd read were as important as this, none of the math tests or history papers had taught me how to act, and by "act" I don't mean on a stage, I mean in life. What I was seeing was nothing less than how to present myself in the world. Watching actors who had memorized their lines and been coached along for months was one thing, but seeing adults stumble and fail was something else entirely. The magic was in identifying where each one went wrong. Mr. Anderson, a loan officer from Liberty Bank, had brought a pipe, a prop that may have been all right to hold, but which he kept clenched between his teeth. A person didn't have to act to know that the ability to separate one's jaws was helpful in speaking, and yet I knew it and he didn't. Then, in the middle of the two-minute speech, he folded the sheet of paper he was reading from, slipped it into the inside pocket of his suit jacket, pulled a box of wooden matches from the patch pocket of that jacket and lit the pipe. The puffing it took to pull the fire into the tobacco, the little flame flashing up from the bowl, it was all part of his audition. Then he put the box of matches and the spent match back in his pocket, removed the page of script, unfolded it and resumed his performance while the sweet pipe smoke drifted towards the rafters and worked its way back to me.

Excerpted from Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. Copyright © 2023 by Ann Patchett. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.