BookLife Review: Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett

mother-daughters, parenthood, family secrets, summer theater, Michigan, past loves, farming

I waited several days between finishing the final page of this book, and writing this review. Tom Lake: A Novel by Ann Patchett, deserves to be digested slowly. It is unrushed. The pace of the novel and the reveal of the backstory is measured; it unfolds in a wondrous sort of back and forth swing, present to past, past to present, and back again. 

Set largely in Michigan, this is a story of family secrets and the abyss between the younger lives of people who become parents and the experience that their children have of them. During the pandemic, in the spring of 2020, Lara and Joe’s three adult daughters return to the family’s cherry orchard farm in Northern Michigan to help with the harvest and to sequester for the pandemic while the world shuts down. The youngest of them has just graduated from college and yearns to be an actress, one is in veterinary school and the third has decided to make the farm and the orchard her life’s work. 

During this time, the daughters persuade their mother to tell the story of her long-ago love affair with a man who became a famous actor, a man she knew before she was married to their father. The setting for young Lara’s coming-of-age was at a nearby summer stock theater company set on a lake known as Tom Lake. There, Lara played Emily in Our Town, a role she had played in high school and in college so well that she was “discovered” and brought to Hollywood. After her Hollywood debut film is shelved, she lands at Tom Lake where the theater company urgently needs to replace their Our Town’s Emily. Also in the summer theater company is Peter Duke, the charismatic and talented actor who later becomes a movie star. 

Lara doles out the tale of her young romance to her daughters in small doses. Throughout their childhood they had watched Duke’s movies and now demand to know the story. That history is painful to Lara; she relays it as the family spends grueling days in cherry trees hand-picking sweet cherries. She skips over some details, preserving them for herself, and pays careful attention to the range of ways that her daughters react to the story’s unfolding. It is delicate, as their beloved father was a bit player in the old story. Each daughter absorbs these gems about their mother’s past differently-the aspiring actress fascinated by her mother’s past success and decision to leave that arena, the committed farmer harboring a muted teenage obsession with the actor whom she wildly believed was her “real father,” and the veterinarian quietly observing her mother and attending to the well-being of mother, father and sisters. 

What is magical about this novel is Patchett’s ability to peel back Lara’s past in a narrative that oh-so-delicately conveys the disconnect and sometimes abyss between parent and child, between the adult child’s perception of her mother as a mature woman and her ability, or inability, to fully appreciate her mother as a woman with a past, with a childhood and, more importantly with a young adulthood before children that in any way might mirror her own experiences, heartbreaks and challenges. To her daughters, Lara is, first and foremost, a mother. For Lara, and her husband, while fully grounded in and enamored of their roles as parents, they are also, at their core, the young people they were before and when they fell in love. Parenthood completes, fulfills and expands them, but it does not alter the experiences that came before them. As true as that is, it likely cannot be fully comprehended by an adult child unless and until they become fifty-something parents themselves. 

So, read, absorb, digest and ponder through yet-another wonderful piece of work by the indomitable Ann Patchett. While I read the book, I can only imagine that the audio version narrated by Meryl Streep could be wondrous, too.