BOOK REVIEW 
Book Title: Tom Lake
Author: Ann Patchett
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Number of Pages: 265
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5266-6427-3
Date Published: 2023
Price: INR 799/-
So is the story about surviving Covid? Not quite. As Patchett says in her interview with Waterstone, “I think of Covid as what a person comes down with and the pandemic as something we lived through, so this was a pandemic story and not a Covid story, insofar as none of the characters are sick.” What is more, the pandemic becomes the catalyst for why the three girls are back home, in a ‘lockdown state’ to help with the massive cherry picking exercise that the parents, the Nelsons, are having to finish as their regular work force has to be kept away. The pandemic is therefore a benign unifying feature in the story, almost a cocoon for the main characters to come together and quite a far cry from the sinister form it has been known for. In that sense, ‘Tom Lake” becomes one of the first works from a major writer on how the pandemic effected some lives in our recent past.
It is during those long, hard working, cherry picking days that the daughters, on learning from their amiable father that their mother had dated the heart throb of an actor who had recently died, that Lara begins to tell her back story to her avidly curious daughters. The daughters prod, conjecture and judge as she picks and chooses details of the story she wants to share with them. As she says, “This is a story about Peter Duke who went on to be a famous actor. This is a story about falling in love with Peter Duke who wasn’t famous at all. It’s about falling so wildly in love with him—the way one will at twenty-four—that it felt like jumping off a roof at midnight. There was no way to foresee the mess it would come to in the end, nor did it occur to me to care. I have long been at peace with Duke the famous actor, but my feelings for the person who walked into my bedroom that first day at Tom Lake are more complicated. I’ve made a point never to think of him at all, except that now I am thinking of him. 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, even the two sheets of paper that are resting there on top of the covers.” (page 74)
Patchett’s narrative style is a clever mix of recounting of the present days being spent in the cherry orchards along with vivid flashbacks from Lara about her work and love life before her marriage. It is in Tom Lake (fashioned after the beautiful Traverse city in Michigan) that Lara finds wings on the back of her intense affair with Peter Duke. The account of the foursome of Peter, his brother Sebastian, Pallace and her having an idyllic life with love and work seamlessly intertwined, breezy and carefree is almost utopian. Only to have it all go awry!
The story raises questions about whether some people you meet in life are destined to return in one way or another to stay with you even if they had gone away. As Peter does and as the Michigan cherry orchards beckon to the Nelson girls and the Duke brothers to come back and be one with the community of one’s origins. There is almost a pull they all feel in coming to rest in the same community or cemetery, as though the dead retain their rights to home in, even if they had gone away. As Peter Duke does and as Sebastian is also invited to? It seems that cemeteries are homely places for the living society and a link with the dead is cherished, as Wilder shows in ‘Our Town’ and Patchett in ‘Tom Lake.”
As for the characters in the story, Joe, the solid rock of a husband to Lara is poorly etched. While the other male characters like Peter, Sebastian and even Ripley are delineated clearly, Joe Nelson for all the eulogies about him from Lara, remains a shadowy figure on the fringes of the story. He had more of an assertive role as Nelson the director. But when he is made to morph into good old Joe, almost like a farm hand, he becomes a background figure. The novel is also a study of sibling relations with the three Nelson sisters and the two Duke brothers in compare and contrast mode.
Even though Lara dominates the story, she does not emerge as a strongly etched character. She remains rather vaguely defined with little agency on how things develop in her life. The question of destiny and free will come up in her context. The fact that she is happy to give up her starry dreams despite the success of her film ‘Singularity’ and settle down to life of contented domesticity seems questionable. Who is she? The Lara of Tom Lake or the one in the cherry orchards?
Beginning as an assistant seamstress to her grandmother, a quirk of fate makes her flower into a sought after actress who arrives in Tom Lake for an acting project to play the role of Emily Gibbs in Thornton Wilder’s much acclaimed play, 'Our Town'. In her acknowledgement Patchett thanks “Thornton Wilder, who wrote the play that has been an enduring comfort, guide and inspiration throughout my life. If this novel has a goal, it is to turn the reader back to Our Town, and to all of Wilder’s work. Therein lies the joy.”
For anyone interested, the movie “Our Town” is available on You Tube and worth a watch. What strikes one immediately is the gentle and harmonious life and times that Wilder portrays in his work which Patchett is so wistful about. These people are normal and reassuring with ordinary preoccupations and worries but with extraordinary reserves of compassion and fellow feeling. Almost like the world in Robert Browning’s Pippa’s Song:
The year's at the spring,/ And day's at the morn;/ Morning's at seven;/ The hill-side's dew-pearl'd;/ The lark's on the wing; / The snail's on the thorn;/ God's in His heaven,/ All's right with the world!
The novel ends with a sense of redemption as all is forgiven and all is right with the world, making it an example of “literature of hope especially at a time when news headlines are dire and bleak.”
‘This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon’ https://www.theblogchatter.com
