Ann Patchett’s ‘Tom Lake’: Quiet Love and a Steamy Affair
Home is where the heart is in the author’s latest novel
When I was a kid, I lived in an area of New York State that was, in many ways, idyllic. The worst thing that Mother Nature threw at us was poison ivy. But while I still love that place deeply, there wasn’t enough action to hold me there. Instead, I became deeply bonded to a grittier patch of Earth, New York City. And I grew even more keenly aware of the ties that other people feel for particular locations when I fell in love with my husband, David, who had New Orleans tattooed on his heart.
I’ll never forget staying in a FEMA trailer with his family after Katrina because his parents’ home was destroyed. His (elderly) mother and father did move, to Los Angeles, where they could be near two of their children. But other friends and family never would leave New Orleans. Perhaps they never could.
This phenomenon — of how closely bonded we become to certain places — sprang to mind after reading Ann Patchett’s latest novel, Tom Lake. The land that is engrained on the primary character’s soul isn’t the location in the title, but rather a cherry farm in Michigan, outside Traverse City.
ONE HOT, STEAMY AFFAIR
Over the course of the novel, readers live inside the mind of a woman named Lara, who was once a budding actress and had a wildfire affair with an actor named Peter Duke. He was a little goofy and rough around the edges at the time, but highly sexual. And he later became one of the greatest actors of his generation. Duke roars off the page with a kind of reckless charisma.
Eventually, Lara veered away from acting, spurning the gossamer visions of great success that others believed she could achieve. She raised three daughters with her husband, Joe, on a fruit farm — with absolutely no regrets.
Lara’s three grown daughters can’t understand why she ever gave up the acting career. And the eldest, who’s been a real problem child in the past, is convinced that the sizzling hot Duke is her biological father. So while they pick cherries on the farm, the daughters demand that Lara tell them what happened long ago when she was performing in a Tom Lake summer stock theater with Duke. The story unfolds almost like a courtroom drama, with the primary witness taking us back in time to relive a period that she rarely thinks about anymore. But instead of the witness stand, there are ladders, cherry trees, and egg salad sandwiches.
Patchett went on an extensive book tour when Tom Lake was released earlier this year, and I listened to two of her recorded interviews. One was produced by Barnes & Noble, and the other was a National Writers Series talk, during which Patchett was interviewed by a friend in Michigan who was a key source when she was researching cherry farming and summer stock.
She discussed some of the novel’s essential aspects — among them, how children are often clueless about their parents’ lives during the period before they were born. It can be almost be as if the parents’ now-ancient histories never existed. Or, unwittingly, the offspring build up fictionalized accounts of what happened that differ wildly from reality.
This can be exasperating at times for Lara in the book, all the more so because the daughters have no compunction about holding back secrets of their own. And they have no apparent understanding of how hurtful that one-way exchange is to their mother.
QUIET LOVE, UNEXPECTED TURNS
Patchett didn’t get into that theme of deep, abiding love for place in the chats I heard. And yet it’s so much a part of this book’s underpinnings. We see Lara falling in love with the cherry farm, even before she was in love with the man who’s family owned it. We see Duke falling in love with it as well, and how much it lingers in his mind long after his brief visit on an idyllic afternoon.
During the National Writers talk, Patchett read an excerpt from the novel that speaks to that. In looking back at what’s transpired in her life after summer stock, Lara says: “Ask that girl who left Tom Lake what she wanted out of life and she would never in a million years have said the Nelson farm in Traverse City, Michigan, but as it turned out, it was all she wanted.”
The quietness of the love for a patch of ground seems to run in parallel to Lara and Joe’s abiding love for each other. At one point, Lara comments: “Good marriages are never as interesting as bad affairs.”
Patchett explained in the interviews that her great admiration for the Thornton Wilder play Our Town was an initial spark that ignited Tom Lake. In the book, Lara performs in it a few different times, including at Tom Lake.
Embarrassingly, I’d never seen it performed or read the play. But after reading Tom Lake, I pulled up the YouTube recording of Spaulding Gray’s performance in it, years ago, at New York’s Lincoln Center. And immediately it was clear that the sense of beloved home ground was within Our Town’s DNA, just as it is in Patchett’s novel.
As you might imagine, Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard also plays a role in the book. So, too, does Sam Shepard’s Fool For Love, which is a kind of sexual, booze-infused counterpoint to Our Town’s chaste world. Theater fans will find a lot appreciate in this novel.
There are many other engrossing aspects of Tom Lake that are very striking. Patchett has a way of revealing seemingly simple perceptions in her books that can sit in the mind very quietly and often go unexamined. Which is why I’ve read so much of her fiction.
As Patchett explained in the National Writers interview: “Literary fiction is like being in love. And I bring half, and you bring half. And it exists in a space between us. And that’s why one person can read a novel and love it. And one person can read a novel and hate it. Because it has to do with the chemistry that you and the book make and can take forward.”
There’s a whole lot of chemistry going on between this book and me, needless to say. But the strongest of all has to do with what Dorothy said: “There’s no place like home.”
