I confess it took me a fair while to get into Tom Lake, Ann Patchett’s new novel. And it may be that had I not already loved several of her previous books, I may have put it down and gone in search for a livelier, more compelling read. But no, I persevered. And yes, it’s another Covid novel.
The story is about Lara, who with her husband Joe, runs an orchard in Michigan. It’s cherry harvest season, and normally they’d have a load of hired help for fruit picking. But because there’s a lockdown the couple have to rely on their family instead – daughters Emily, Maisie and Nell. Maisie and Nell are taking a forced break from their classes – Maisie, studying to be a vet, helps out neighbours when their livestock and pets are sick, while Nell with ambitions to be an actress, is anxious about her loss of in-person lectures. Emily with her horticulture study behind her is all set to take over the orchard.
And while the girls are among the trees with their mother, they beg her to talk about her own early acting career and the summer she dated a famous actor. At first I thought the actor must have been called Tom Lake, but that is the name of the location of a summer theatre, where Lara, waiting for her first movie to be released, steps in at the last minute to play Emily in Our Town.
“Did you ever think that you were going to marry Duke?” Emily asks, bringing the story back to me.
Given that marriage is Topic A, I try to remember. Did I ever look at Duke in my bed asleep, the cigarettes on the nightstand, his arm thrown across my chest, and think, yes, you, every morning, forever?
“No,” I say.
“But you loved him,” Emily says.
“I was twenty-four.”
“That’s a yes,” Maisie says.
There’s a charming story before that about how Lara, then Laura, was just helping out with the auditions for a local amateur production and somehow ended up playing Emily. She’d no plans to act, was studying to be a teacher, but became Emily again for a student production. Things just serendipitously fall into place and Lara becomes a promising young actress, praised for her naturalness.
Then at Tom Lake, Lara meets Peter Duke, and he sweeps her off her feet, the two in the same production of Our Town, which, if you didn’t know before, is an iconic American play by Thornton Wilder. And this is where I felt the plot sagged a little. There is just such a lot of detail about rehearsals and the characters in the play and lots of names to remember, not only the characters of the play but also the actors playing them.
Lara meets Pallace, the gorgeous black dancer who is her understudy and they become friends. When Duke’s brother Sebastian visits he is smitten by Pallace and the four hang out together on their days off. Then around halfway into the story, things pick up. There’s a surprise that makes you think, Oh! and it’s a nice surprise really and I became quite immersed.
The more I think about the book now, I realise there’s a lot going on here. It’s a book that is about both the past and the future, while time hangs in the present, a cherry harvest to bring in and the ongoing anxiety about Covid. The past history of a mother and her abrupt change of career, her discovery of the man she will marry, so different from Duke, whom everyone is so obsessed with.
The cloud hanging over the orchard’s future in the shape of climate change. Without reliable frosts, you can’t grow cherries. You might not think the world a suitable place to bring up children. That certainly seems to be the feeling among Lara’s daughters, so it’s no wonder they beg to hear a story from long ago. A story with a hint of glamour and a summer season at a playhouse. But is the past all it’s cracked up to be? For while there’s a cloud hanging over the future, you can’t help but wonder, why did Lara throw in the towel on a promising acting career?
So in the end I did appreciate the craft that is here in Tom Lake. It’s a perfectly pitched, finely written and original novel. I realise I’ll have to see Our Town – there’s a film of the play starring Paul Newman as Stage Manager on Youtube which looks promising. I’ll probably watch it and go, ‘Oh, yes’ a few times as I think back to the book. In the meantime Tom Lake gets four out of five stars from me.
Judith McKinnon 