Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

Title: Tom Lake
Author: Ann Patchett
Publication: HarperCollins, hardcover, 2023
Genre: Fiction
Setting: Michigan

Description: During the pandemic, Lara’s adult children came home, as many did, and as her daughters help out with the family business, they ask her to tell them about her long-ago relationship with famous actor Peter Duke. Lara worked with and fell in love with him during the staging of a summer stock performance of Our Town, the play in which Lara had also played Emily while in high school. Her recollections of Tom Lake in Northern Michigan, where the summer theater company was located, surprise the three sisters and disrupt their assumptions about the past. However, as they begin to understand the summer that changed Lara’s life, this helps the sisters, especially the difficult, eldest daughter, build a mature relationship with their mother.

My Impression: This is a delightful and absorbing novel about ambition, love, secrets, and family with a strong sense of place. Ann Patchett is known for her compelling storytelling and in Tom Lake her heroine, Lara, is literally telling the story of a pivotal summer to her sometimes critical three daughters while they help with the harvest on the family farm. Lara reveals how her acting career began accidentally when she and her best friend were asked to help with tryouts for a community production of Our Town when they were in high school in New Hampshire. Back then she was Laura, without any desire to act, but was so exasperated by the faltering wannabe actors that she tried out for and secured the lead, listing her name as “Lara” because it sounded Russian and worldly. Her success in the part of Emily eventually leads her to Tom Lake, a quaint Michigan resort town with a highly regarded summer theater:

“You know Tom Lake?”

I nodded. I did not know.

“They’re doing Our Town this summer.”

“Seems like everyone is.”

“They just lost their Emily. She did the first table read then got a call from her agent telling her to pack up. It’s a big film, and the studio is covering her cancellation clause. My friend asked me to keep an eye out since he knew we’re auditioning. They’re going to need someone who can step right in.”

“That would be me. . . ”

At first, the alternating timelines, told in the first person, were distracting and I was so interested in the theater sections I was sometimes reluctant to return to the harvest. Then, the story develops a pace and Patchett intermingles the past and the present brilliantly, allowing the reader to guess what happened seconds before Lara reveals it to her daughters. While the book takes place during the pandemic and the family has no contact with anyone except Emily’s boyfriend, from the adjoining farm, that aspect of the setting is secondary to the rhythm of harvesting cherries in the present and the equally hard work (but with more fun interspersed) of summer stock back in the past. 

As the daughters listen and ask questions, they realize they have made a lot of assumptions about their mother and family history without ever having understood Lara and her choices. Their father is a quiet secondary character whose loyalty contrasts with the mercurial Duke. Lara herself is incredibly detached about some very emotional experiences in her past (injury, betrayal, evaporation of her acting career) and she basically says it is because she wound up in the right place. It takes the entire book for her to persuade her daughters of this. Lara reveals a lot but keeps some secrets to herself.

Tom Lake is dedicated to children’s author, Kate DiCamillo, a Betsy-Tacy fan, and it is nice to think of these two talented authors having become friends; perhaps Kate once did a book signing at Parnassus Books in Nashville, which Ann owns.  The book is inspired by Our Town but there are also allusions to Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard.  It would be fun to reread all three with my book group. 

Source: Library