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Summary and Reviews of Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

Tom Lake

A Novel

by Ann Patchett
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  • Critics' Consensus (14):
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  • First Published:
  • Aug 1, 2023, 320 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Apr 2025, 320 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America's finest writers.

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.

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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

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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. 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...continued

Full Review (751 words)

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(Reviewed by Erin Lyndal Martin).

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Beyond the Book



Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) and Our Town

Black and white photo of Thornton Wilder in 1948In Ann Patchett's novel Tom Lake, the main character fondly remembers starring in a production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. This is Wilder's best-known play, which debuted in 1938 to mixed reviews but earned him a Pulitzer Prize that same year, making him the only writer to have received the award in both fiction and drama.

Born in Wisconsin to a father who was a newspaper editor and diplomat, the young author was exposed to travel and writing early on. He attended Oberlin and Yale for undergraduate study, and Princeton for graduate school. He also studied Italian and archaeology at the American Academy of Rome.

Wilder volunteered for military service in both World Wars. In the first, he spent eight months with a U.S. Coast Guard ...

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