Tom Lake Book Review by Ann Patchett || A Ponderous Look at Past Love, Secrets, and Mother-Daughter Relationships || ENGLIXXY

About Ann Patchett

To truly appreciate Tom Lake a novel steeped in secrets and the quiet power of mother-daughter relationships we must first acknowledge the unconventional foundation of its author, Ann Patchett. Born on December 2, 1963, in Los Angeles, she is the younger of two daughters. Her childhood was anything but static: her mother and father divorced when she was young, and after her mother remarried, the family moved to Nashville when Patchett was six years old, setting the stage for a unique life in the American South. This personal history of public intensity, private discipline, and enforced communication certainly influences her narrative style, which often juxtaposes high drama with domestic containment, a trait I find particularly compelling in her best work.

The core family dynamic was dramatic, rooted in her parents’ professions: her father, Frank Patchett (a Los Angeles police captain who arrested Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan), and her mother, Jeanne Ray (a nurse who later became a novelist). She has described her stepfather as a “very, very weird guy” who had her carry a gun as early as age sixteen, and she partially attributes her disinterest in texting to his forcing her mother to carry a pager and respond to him on demand. This biographical structure informed her academic rigor: Patchett attended St. Bernard Academy, a private, Catholic school for girls in Nashville run by the Sisters of Mercy, before studying further up north.

Her path shows a focused endurance: After graduation, she attended Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York. Following college, Ann Patchett attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she fostered a life long friendship with memoirist and poet Lucy Grealy, a bond explored in her 2004 memoir, Truth & Beauty. Although Patchett married in her early twenties, the marriage lasted only about a year. She then dedicated herself wholly to her craft, winning a fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, during her time there, she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, which was published in 1992.

Beyond writing, Patchett’s commitment to books became concrete in 2010, when she co-founded the bookstore Parnassus Books with Karen Hayes, in Nashville. It opened in November 2011. In 2016, Parnassus Books expanded, adding a bookmobile, expanding the reach of the bookstore in Nashville. Patchett lives in Nashville with her husband, Karl VanDevender. As someone who is also devoted to the written word, I see in her career including the years she worked at Seventeen magazine, where she wrote primarily non-fiction and once had a famous dispute with an editor, exclaiming “I’ll never darken your door again!”, the exact kind of focused passion that makes her books so deeply resonant.

PLOT of tom lake

Tom Lake is a quiet and introspective novel about how one’s past impacts the present and future. The author, Ann Patchett, is very well known even outside the book-o-sphere as both an award-winning author and owner/proud champion of an independent bookstore. While I haven’t loved all of her novels, they are always thought-provoking and illuminating about our place in the world and how to live our best imperfect lives. The story is set in spring of 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic. The protagonist, Lara Nelson, a 57-year-old former actress, is sheltering in place with her husband and three adult daughters at the family’s farm in Northern Michigan. Lara is secretly and selfishly joyful that a global crisis has brought her grown daughters back to live at the family farm, especially since they grew up picking cherries and can fill in for absent seasonal workers. As their father, Joe, puts it to the middle child, Maisie (a budding vet), “College is closed. College can’t save you now.”

To help pass the time, Lara agrees to tell them about her own past, specifically the summer she dated the now famous movie star, Peter Duke. Interspersed with Lara’s carefully chosen words about her own teenaged and twenty-something years are her twenty-something daughters’ reactions to each segment. The dialogue and internal thoughts are almost always snappy but never overwritten or unrealistic. The youngest (Nell, an aspiring actor), agrees when Maisie announces, ”I didn’t know it was going to be funny,” at the beginning of chapter two. Lara responds: “It isn’t funny,” I tell them. “You know that. It isn’t a funny story except for the parts that are,” “Life,” Nell, says, dropping, her, head, against, my, shoulder, in, a, way, that, touches, me. “Keep going,”. Before I started reading Tom Lake, I assumed the title was a character’s name. Turns out, it’s a location that is metaphorically at least, the geographic centrum of the book. Though all of the “now” action takes place within the boundaries of the family farm, Lara Nelson clearly would have had a very different life if she’d never acted in the summer stock theatre at Tom Lake. It was there that she met her husband, as well as the now-famous movie star she “dated” that.

Lara herself muses about that term’s interpretation, aided by a mother’s careful filtering of facts. Early on, she explains to the reader that “the parts they’re waiting to hear are the parts I’m never going to tell them.” Later, she adds: “I am making one part of my life into a story for my daughters, and even though they are grown women and very forward-thinking, let’s just assume I leave out every mention of the bed.” Over the course of a few days Lara indulges them, bring both her kids and the readers back to her early twenties, (which fell during the 1980s) in which a young girl is whisked to Hollywood after catching the eye of a director in a community play. A few years into her career she is offered the chance to act in a summertime community theatre production in an idyllic place called Tom Lake. It’s here that she meets Peter, his brother, some new friends, and learns the difference between those who like to act, and those who must act. Patchett’s writing is a masterclass in how to tell a good story without drawing attention to words being used, until you notice a particularly thoughtful turn of phrase, or a quip that gets a good laugh.

The natural world plays a large role in this story; the lake itself is a source of wonder and relaxation for Lara’s summer at Tom Lake, and the cherry orchard determines the course of many lives. Working on a farm is at once romanticized but also realistically drawn, as the never-ending work and struggle of farming are often touched upon. Her descriptions of the natural world are some of the best I’ve read, simply because they don’t drone on, but also use examples and comparisons that everyone can relate to: “The order in the rows of trees and the dark green of the lush grass beneath them soothed me like a hand brushing across my forehead.” Family dynamics are also a major theme in this book. Patchett deftly describes the various kinds of families and their varying degrees of closeness. So much of this story is about looking into the past and examining the shifting course of one’s life over time. She captures the wide open possibilities of youth in the summertime just as expertly as the dichotomies of parenting.

The plotting is also very well done. As the story of Lara’s youth emerges, people’s past and present collide, and the reader is let in on a few secrets that Lara won’t even tell her own kids, so it feels like a story meant ‘just for us’. Small details are withheld as we slowly move through that fateful summer at Tom Lake, and even the very end of the book holds a few surprises, so there’s just enough (realistic) suspense to keep the pages turning. When I finished the book, I immediately went back to the beginning and read the whole thing again because the ending raised an annoying question: how had I already known a fact that was (I thought) only actually revealed on the final pages? Turns out, there were several breadcrumbs, including one that on the second read through, seemed to land far too early. But that tiny mistake only made me more impressed with the otherwise seamless story weaving; on any given page, I didn’t really care what year it actually was.

It’s been four years since the pandemic first began and so much has changed since then thankfully life has gotten back to normal. But I think all of us probably hold some type of trauma remembering how scary it was those first few months when we didn’t know anything about this new disease. I think some stories have handled it better than others. This is probably the best take I’ve read on it. Yes, it’s during a pandemic and the only reason all three daughters are at the farm is a result of it, but it also takes the reader on such a different journey that the pandemic didn’t suck up all the energy of this book. I think many of us were probably quite introspective at that time and thought about the past. Although for me, I was pregnant with my son Theo (who is now three) so I was thinking about the future and still held on to hope that things would be better, which they are now.

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