Having read a few less than glowing reviews of this Patchett novel, I admit I approached it with low expectations. Perhaps that was part of the reason I found it unexpectedly enjoyable. (I have mostly enjoyed all Patchett’s other novels, though, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised.)
Tom Lake is the site of Lara, our protagonist’s life changing summer. Her story of her brief acting career and summer romance is told to her 3 daughters, Emily, Maisie and Nell, as they frantically harvest cherries from their orchard. The girls are home for the COVID lockdown that year, although they had already left home (except for Emily, who never really left, and is going to marry the boy next door). Now they are home and in the thick of the cherry harvest, they want their mother’s story of the time she was briefly an actress, of being in love with the leading man, Peter Duke, and how she ended up married instead to their father, Joe Nelson, who was their play’s director.
Lara’s involvement in acting was serendipity taken to an extreme. From registering actors at a reception desk to help her grandmother out, Lara gets cast as the play’s, Our Town’s, leading actress, Emily. From there she is noticed, given an audition and a part in a movie in LA. When there is a hold up in the release of the movie, her kindly agent sends her to Tom Lake in Michigan to play Emily once more, taking over from the lead actress who had to drop out at the last minute. With Lara, the play can go on. And Duke falls for Lara at once, and the summer romance commences even before the first rehearsal. The only problem with this wonderful state of affairs, is that Lara is essentially a one trick pony, something she knew all along, and had no real issue with. Patchett’s writing is wonderful – witty and amusing as she describes this:
“Everyone regarded me as talented so maybe it was taking me a minute to shift gears. But I didn’t have another gear. Ripley had told me not to take acting classes, but he had also given me a part in a movie in which I was essentially Emily again, and a part in a sitcom in which I was essentially Emily. Even hawking Diet Dr Pepper I was Emily, because she was the only thing I knew how to do. I had the range of a box turtle. I was excellent as long as no one moved me” (p177).
Box turtle had me in fits of laughter. I can only imagine that Lara holds her three grown up daughters riveted as she tells them this story of her past, their history, while they are all up in cherry trees, picking madly. Another passage which held me and which I find so evocative, so vivid in its description, and so unforgettable, was the minutia of the napkins in an antique shop. This is vintage Patchett, able to take such a domestic little detail and render it unforgettable in prose. This is at a very pivotal stage of the story; Joe Nelson, the father of Lara’s three daughters, was at that time only her director, and who had invited her to the cherry tree farm of his uncle and aunt. Lara blithely invites Duke along, and also Duke’s brother, Sebastian, and Pallace, Lara’s understudy and Sebastian’s girlfriend by then. All 4 merrily go for lunch at the magical cherry tree farm where we know Lara ends up somehow, forever. Lara insists on finding something to bring, a pie, or anything else, and when they pass an antique shop, she insists they stop.
“I’d been invited to lunch by our director and I’d be damned if I arrived without a gift. Just inside the door, on top of a glass display case, a dozen linen napkins with cutwork around the edge were sitting in a basket waiting for me. They were blue nearly pale enough to be white, nicely ironed. I knew very little when I was young, but I knew the role of Emily, and I knew fabric. These were good napkins. I counted them slowly, looking for stains and finding none. As a bonus, they were expensive, and that pleased me more than anything” (159).
The detail of their being expensive and that was exactly what Lara wanted, is a beautiful detail, demonstrating her sense of propriety, upbringing, her very person, unchanged by the glamour of her brief summer in the sun and romance with heart-throb and later Oscar-winning actor, Peter Duke.
Lara’s youth, half set in the late 1990s, nevertheless captures a period almost as if in the distant past, although no more than 3 decades ago. The US was a different place, slower moving of course, but also seemingly less harsh, less aggressive, more polite, more gallant. A place before smart phones and social media, where a certain innocence was still possible, even amongst the very permissive lifestyle of actors. Most of the excitement happens in a single and singular summer. As Lara says, “They were long days, summer stock days. For me, it may as well have been a geological age” (p246). Everyone was young and beautiful and behaved as if there were no consequences. Until, of course, there were, and things came crashing down. But despite the build up, this remains a very controlled story, a mother relating her past to her three fascinated daughters and taking great care to tread in such a way that the past should not hurt them, but also that there was no falsehood.
This is a quiet sort of novel in a sense, an understated novel, charming exactly because it is so contained. If the daughters come across as props in a play, the audience who roots for their mum, who holds hands with each other and are loving sisters as well as supportive daughters, then it is because this is a play of sorts, because Lara has only one part to play all her life, sometimes called Emily, but essentially, she plays herself. Life imitating art perhaps.
[For another take on this book, see Susan’s review]
Tom Lake
Ann Patchett
Harper, 2023
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