Readers who grew up in America and loved Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (described by Edward Albee as “the greatest American play ever written”) will probably love Ann Patchett’s latest novel, Tom Lake.
Our Town appears both explicitly and implicitly in Tom Lake. Both novel and play describe a peaceful small town where the focus is on the normal lives of the residents. Tom Lake, is a Covid novel, set in 2020 when the protagonist’s three daughters return to the family cherry orchard farm because of the pandemic. It describes the silver lining that Covid brought to some lucky families whose grown children were unexpectedly homebound and family bonds rekindled.
As for the explicit invocation of Our Town, Tom Lake starts with Lara and her friend helping to run the auditions for the play back in high school. Student after student reads the lines, but eventually Lara turns out to be the perfect ‘Emily’ in the play. Years later in her twenties, Lara ends up filling the same role of Emily in a production of Our Town in Tom Lake, a summer theater town in Michigan.
The three daughters are almost impossibly sweet, and close to each other as well as their parents. One night they watch an old movie on TV, and their father mentions that their mother used to date Peter Duke, the handsome star.
Emily said that Daddy was making it up. Nell wanted to know if Duke and I had gone to school together. Maisie asked when he was coming to our house. […]They were relentless. How had it happened, they wanted to know. Why hadn’t I married Duke instead?
Which sets up the frame for this novel: their mother Lara’s tale of her romance with Peter Duke.
Patchett excels in gentle family interactions. Lara’s three daughters:
“You had a ‘u’ in your name?” Emily looks at me skeptically.
“For sixteen years.”
“Did you know she had a ‘u’?” she asks her sisters, and they shake their heads, mystified by what I’ve withheld from them.
The girls with Lara:
“You should have been famous,” Nell says finally. “I think that’s what kills me.”
I raise myself up on my elbows, taking a moment to admire the sun in my daughters’ hair. “Famous? Are you serious?”
They stir the grass very slightly with their nodding heads.
I lift up my hand to the lushness of the tress. “Look at this! Look at the three of you. You think my life would have been better making commercials for lobster rolls?”
Patchett is perceptive as always, in this case via Lara’s voice:
Joe took all of this better than I did, but what else was new? Joe took everything better than I did.
Joe would swear in front of a firing squad that he has no favorite daughter, and while there may be no favorite, one of them is indisputably more useful than the others.
The quotes above are representative, and as you see, there is little family conflict. While a million novels have been written about dysfunctional families, and it is very soothing to read about one that is not, the complete lack of tension in the novel was, I thought, to its detriment. Lara’s husband Joe (who also knew Peter Duke back in the day) is loving, calm, and doesn’t have a jealous bone in his body, even when their daughters are persistently fascinated by their mother’s history with Duke. The daughters have no problems except for a few question marks about their future careers, and they get along wonderfully well. They have 3 widely different career interests — veterinary science, acting, and farm management — so there is no competition. The women characters are all effortlessly beautiful. Even during Lara’s brief failed stint in Hollywood, makeup artists marvel at her ‘shampoo-commercial hair’. Lara has no regrets about her romantic or career decisions. There is one plot twist, but it is neatly handled with no lingering ill effects for the characters. For me, this made the novel rather bland, and it’s hard to imagine that the same author wrote the powerful Bel Canto.
Unfortunately, I am not one of the Our Town fans, and this inevitably coloured my appreciation for Patchett’s novel as well. (Full disclosure: I was introduced to Our Town by my kid, who had to study it for a high school English class; neither of us grew up in small-town America, and both of us found the play boringly conservative.)
Tom Lake is a pleasantly comfortable read, but not one to remember or re-read.
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