Are you holding a cradle? A creaky old porch swing? A bay window with built-in seating? If not, Ann Patchett’s new novel, “Tom Lake,” will put you there mentally. I wouldn’t be surprised if this puts your fitness tracker on the fritz, even if you go around listening Meryl Streep read the audio version.
This author is a decorated and beloved figure in American letters – spinning novels, memoirs and essays like so many multicolored silks; opening an independent bookstore in Nashville to fight the Amazon anaconda; even helping to care for Tom Hanks’ cancer-stricken personal assistant — who I sometimes think of as Aunt Patchett.
Patchett’s actual family of origin is complicated, as he is made explicit after the 2016 publication of the semi-autobiographical “Commonwealth.” “The Dutch House” (2019), with its evil mother, does not shy away from the idea that living with relatives can be chaotic and hellish.
With “Tom Lake,” he treats us – and perhaps himself – to a vision of a family that is beautiful, simple in the lump: nuclear, in its pre-bomb sense.
Like some guardian angel in the sky, Anton Chekhov swirls around this story, which features three sisters in their 20s and is set in their parents’ cherry orchard (albeit in northern Michigan during the recent pandemic , no tuberculosis-torn Russian provinces). But Thornton Wilder drives the tractor.
Unhappily seized in lockdown, the sisters’ mother, Lara (she dropped the “u” after reading “Doctor Zhivago”), tells them, after tiring days in the field, about her long that, short-lived career as an actress, the highlight of which was starring as Emily Gibbs, the tragic heroine of Wilder’s wildly popular piece of Americana, “Our Town.”
In flashbacks, we learn that she played Emily in both high school and college in New Hampshire, which is also home to the play’s fictional Grover’s Corners. Then, after a brief and disorienting detour in Hollywood, he returned to the role in summer stock in a theater company, the titular Tom Lake, which happened to be near the orchard.
“Even hawking Diet Dr Pepper, I’m Emily, because that’s all I know how to do,” Lara realizes after beginning rehearsals to play Mae in Sam’s slightly less innocent “Fool for Love” Shepard. “I have the range of a box turtle. I’m fine, as long as nothing moves me.” Emily is as important to her as Barbie, it seems, to so many others: a character so well-formed, she gave the name for Lara’s firstborn.
Lara’s Emily doesn’t aspire to be an actress – that particular hardship happens to the youngest daughter, Nell, named for Lara’s seamstress grandmother – but she is strongly focused on her mother’s former co-star and ex-boyfriend: one Peter Duke, who played Emily Webb’s father in Tom Lake.
“Duke,” as everyone calls him, becomes a huge celebrity, enthralling children in a movie musical called “The Popcorn King,” singing and dancing on a floor covered in popcorn. grain, then became a Serious Actor, won an Oscar and inevitably descended into addiction. As a teenager, Lara’s Emily is convinced that she, not Lara’s hardworking husband, is her father, and Patchett falls into a subtle enough similarity — their hair, a certain physical rubberiness (” whoever puts his inner compass on puts the magnet upside down.”) — that the reader is left in real suspense about whether it is true.
But the larger theme may be unimportant: Our children inherit the full range of our experience, such as genetic traits.
“Tom Lake” is not a swashbuckling novel — the flashbacks are to the 1980s, when parents hovered less — but it is resolutely folksy, cozy, a thing of pies and quilts and nettlesome goats and a middle child named Maisie after an aunt. (Lara, in her late 50s in rural Michigan, is a demographic anomaly, leaving too many of her old friends in the deep clouds of memory without trying to hunt them down on Facebook.) Nell senior had a business. in sewing and the sayings of the countrified will appear here like dropped stitches. You can knock me down with a feather! Idle hands? We all know whose workshop they are. “You can’t swing a cat” without hitting a castle, in Scotland. Wilder’s two performances of Stage Manager are “chalk and cheese apart.”
But Patchett is, as always, sneakily pointing out his own pillowcase mottos. “Nothing can explain this simple truth about life: You can forget most of it.” “Sweet cherries must be picked now and every day until they are gone.” “Swimming is the reset button.” This last is mentioned by a soft and beautiful Black character named Pallace — whose integration into the theatrical utopia seems all too easy.
“Tom Lake” is a quiet and encouraging book, not a rabble-rouser. This was very conscious of Emily Gibbs speech about man’s failure to appreciate the little things, the Stage Manager’s line about the earth “making it difficult all the time to do something to himself,” and of damages to that land. Domestic contentment is its North Star, generational continuity its reliable moon. Only a cynic could resist lying on a nice fluffy blanket to marvel at Patchett’s twinkling planetarium.
TOM LAKE | By Ann Patchett | 320 pp. | HarperCollins | $30