Chris’s Pick
September 2023
Tom Lake
Ann Patchett
Harper Publishing, August 1, 2023
Tom Lake begins in a high school in New Hampshire, where teenaged Lara is registering people who have come to try out for the classic 1938 play Our Town, a play which she knows and loves. The auditioners are so bad that she decides to step in and audition for the crucial role of Emily. Her success as Emily indicates much of the rest of her life.
Some thirty years later, Lara‘s twenty-something three daughters have all come home to the family’s farm in Michigan to ride out the pandemic. Without the normal farming help, the family has taken on the cherry picking themselves. To make the chore of less odious, the three girls begin to badger their mother with unanswered questions about her youth and short-lived acting career. So, Lara begins to tell the story of a long-ago romance with a man who would become a world-famous actor, and a summer stock theater company in Tom Lake.
As Lara’s tale unfolds throughout the book, the three daughters bring their own life concerns into the story. Unlike Lara’s generation, the worries of these young people are unique to them; climate change, the pandemic, the right to love who you love, and how a happy future can feel unattainable. But, as Patchett explains, “The beauty and the suffering are equally true.” We all hold those opposite truths, that there is a lot to feel terrible about but there is much to feel joyful about. We watch as the daughters puzzle out who Lara is as a separate person, apart from the mother role, and it is a fascinating journey.
Each of our lives is, of course, a compilation of our stories that we tell ourselves and others over the course of years. Lara is not going to tell her daughters the whole story, but as Patchett says, nobody tells anybody the whole story. All our stories are edited. It’s not that you’re lying, it’s just you shape your story to fit your audience.
Tom Lake is classic Patchett, and those of us who love her work will recognize her reflections on the road not taken, on relationships and their maintenance, and on confinement narrative—a favorite theme of hers. As always, Patchett directs us to other works of literature and artists throughout the book, each of whom inspire the story. But the quote from Our Town “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?__every, every minute?” seems to be the underpinning of this novel… that your life is a compilation of small moments and either you are awake and paying attention to each moment or you are always looking ahead to the future and therefore missing your life.
Finally, although wonderful to read, the Tom Lake audiobook is narrated by the incomparable Meryl Streep. That is a special experience.