I never thought it was possible, but this book, Tom Lake (2023) by Ann Patchett, is a book about happiness. Of course bad things happen, they always do, but the bad things are related from another time well after the bad things, a happy time so the reader is always aware that the bad times were overcome.
I have been criticised before for using the term ‘soft fiction’. Some people think this a derogitory phrase. Not at all. By ‘soft fiction’ I mean there are no car chases, revolutions, earthquakes, spies, murders, or zombies. Plot points are naturalistic which the general reader can relate to. Patchett writes about family and in this book she writes about family to such a naturalistic degree that it feels like memoir; the verisimilitude is so strong. It’s very very good soft fiction.
The happy family are the Nelsons. Lara and Joe, in the general present, live on a stone friut farm in northern Michigan bordering the Great Lakes, Lake Michigan to be precise. They grow cherries, apples and pears in ‘the best’ and prettiest fruit growing district near Traverse City. Their three daughters, Emily, Nell, and Maisie, are adults and home for the late summer to help with the cherry harvest. While picking cherries Lara tells her daughters about her life from High School to her mid twenties when she had a romance with a famous movie actor, Peter Duke. He wasn’t famous then, of course, but the girls want to hear the details of the mother’s story having grown up with bones of the affaire all their lives.
Lara’s story begins with the auditions for a local, New Hampshire, production of Thornton Wilder’s iconic play Our Town. Lara and Peter met in summer stock when Lara thought she wanted to be an actor; she was ‘so good’ as Emily! Circumstances led her to another procuction of Our Town at Tom Lake where Peter Duke was cast as her father, Editor Webb. Their affaire began on the day she arrived only minutes after meeting Peter Duke who told her she couldn’t meet the rest of the company that afternoon because “you’ll be busy.”
What happens at Tom Lake is at the heart of the narrative. One of the things that makes the book so interesting and intringuing is that these two narratives, the cherry picking days and the summer stock months, we know will eventually converge to produce Lara’s happy family. But of course we don’t know how.
The other successful ingredient is Ann Patchett. Her first person narrator, Lara, is a reader’s joy. It’s like she’s leaning towards you, elbows on knees, in a living room in front of the fire when everyone else has gone to bed and telling you things she would’t dare tell anybody else, especially her daughters. You are forever in her thrall and made to feel special because of it.
I liked her The Dutch House (2019) but this is so much better.
It’s the best book I’ve ever read since the last best book I ever read … which was a while ago.
When next you go to your doctor for a perscription for anti-depressants don’t be surprised if it says ‘read Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake.’ It will be cheaper and more effective.
Here you can watch an interview with the wise and wonderful Ann Patchett courtesy of PBS News Hour.
You can buy the book in various formats here, where you can also read a sample for free.
-oOo-
P.S. It was very hard to find a picture of the cover of this book that didn’t look like this, the American cover:
Americans are so keen on overstatement. They don’t go horseriding, they go horseback riding, just in case you’re not sure where to sit. They don’t walk on a footpath they walk on a sidewalk, just in case you might think it’s OK to walk on the road. And they put ‘a novel’ on the cover of a novel just in case it’s a novel you really want to buy, not a cheesecake.
Michael K Freundt 