BookBrowse Reviews Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

BookBrowse:

Tom Lake centers on a woman telling her grown daughters about her past, including a brief romance with a now-famous movie star.

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"The thing about picking cherries is that you can look only at the tree you're on, and if you have any sense, you'll just look at the branch you have your hands in," says Lara, the narrator of Ann Patchett's Tom Lake. Lara and her husband own a cherry orchard in Michigan, and the book takes place during the harvest of the summer month, for which her three grown daughters are onsite to help. It's the middle of the pandemic, so there isn't much else to do, and they beg Lara to tell them the story of how she came to date heartthrob actor Peter Duke when she was younger.

When Lara says you can only look at the tree you're on, she's also stating one of the novel's themes. Just as some of their cherries are sweet and some are tart, so are her memories (like everyone's), and it's wisest to focus on what's in front of you. Though the characters describe problems that may befall their crop at other times, the harvest is abundant and ripe. The scenes of Lara telling her story probably cover only a few days, but they have an eternal present tense about them, as long days of a summer spent in pandemic isolation do. When Lara revisits the past, those stories are told with the same immediacy, giving the reader a sense that the past and present are happening simultaneously.

I couldn't believe how easy it was to get into the book and absorbed in Lara's story. As a writer myself, I took a lot of notes about Patchett's style here. Rather than crafting shimmering passages that call attention to her skill, Patchett's gift is to make herself disappear so we can better connect with the characters. Lara is likable and unpretentious. From the start we learn of her unlikely path to fame: while in high school, she observed auditions for the role of Emily in her New Hampshire town's production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town (see Beyond the Book). She didn't think anyone did justice to the character and decided to audition herself. A Hollywood producer happened to see one performance and offered her a movie audition. Lara wasn't fame-hungry or ambitious; she just had a naturalness about her that worked (echoed by her unpierced ears and unprocessed hair). Lara's daughter Nell wants to be an actress too and can't believe her mother gave it up. Lara pithily observes, "[A]nd that is the difference between us: I was very good at being myself, while Nell is very good at being anyone at all." (Meryl Streep, also known for being capable of playing anyone at all, narrates the audiobook for Tom Lake.)

The titular lake is the place in Michigan where Lara spends a summer doing Our Town and meets the pre-fame Peter Duke. The lake has a powerful presence in the story. As the characters spend endless hours in rehearsals, they start wearing swimsuits under their clothes so they can jump in for a swim as quickly as possible. The lake comes to represent the innocence and freedom of that summer, even in moments that lack these qualities. Lara learns that Peter is not as perfect as she thought, yet she's able to look back and appreciate that summer as a pivotal time in her life. In Our Town, the past and present converge into a reminder to appreciate everything, and the detailed nature of Lara's story reflects this sentiment. Yet, she omits details of a sexual nature for the sake of her daughters. Given that she regularly shares things with the reader she doesn't say aloud, I'd hoped for at least a few lines about sex.

The events of Lara's life flow perfectly together, which makes it exciting when we learn how she goes from swimming with a movie star to owning a cherry orchard with a husband and kids. Also, that's really how life is: we never know if a single moment will turn out to be important or not, or when we'll see someone for the last time, or how what we will come to learn about them in future will change how we see the past.

About Our Town, Wilder said, "It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events of our daily life." In Tom Lake, a pandemic summer on a cherry orchard is the place to observe these small events—and to retell them so that the telling becomes an event as well.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in October 2023, and has been updated for the December 2023 edition. Click here to go to this issue.