{"id":9997,"date":"2023-09-29T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-09-29T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9997"},"modified":"2023-09-28T23:53:36","modified_gmt":"2023-09-29T03:53:36","slug":"tom-lake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2023\/09\/29\/tom-lake\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Lake."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ann Patchett remains one of my favorite contemporary novelists; I think she\u2019s only missed once, really, with Run<\/a><\/em>, which was too heavy-handed in its political allegory, and Taft<\/a><\/em> is probably the weakest of the remainder even though it\u2019s above the line for me. Bel Canto<\/a> <\/em>remains her magnum opus and one of the best works of American fiction since World War II, reimagining The Magic Mountain<\/a> <\/em>through a fictionalized version of the T\u00fapac Amaru hostage crisis, and other than Run <\/em>she\u2019s been on a roll this century with State of Wonder<\/a><\/em>, Commonwealth<\/a><\/em>, and The Dutch House<\/a><\/em>, the last of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, losing to The Nickel Boys<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Patchett\u2019s run of success continues with Tom Lake<\/a><\/em>, which returns to the motif of reworking a classic of literature into a modern narrative, while also seeing her return to themes of family history and mythmaking, this time through the lens of a family matriarch telling her life story to her three grown daughters. Lara is in her late 50s, but the bulk of the story she\u2019s telling her girls is about the few years when she played Emily in a community theater production of Our Town<\/em>, which led to a summer gig playing the same character in the western Michigan town of Tom Lake, where rich people would spend a few days or a week at the lake and often drop in to see a prestigious actor or two on the stage. While there, Lara has a fling with a young actor named Duke who would later go on to great fame in Hollywood, first as a heartthrob and later as a more serious actor. Lara\u2019s daughters have known about her affair with Duke, with very little of the details, but the pandemic throws them all together on the family cherry orchard, giving them plenty of time together to talk, and for the kids \u2013 the eldest of whom, Emily, was once convinced that Duke was actually her father \u2013 to grill their mother.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lara is right about the age Patchett was when she was writing Tom Lake<\/em>, and this novel feels like her second attempt at an autobiographical work, this time perhaps more inspired by the way we reconsider our lives as we cross the half-century mark (which I did earlier this year). I\u2019m not aware of Patchett having a summer fling with a future movie star, but Tom Lake<\/em> reads like someone reckoning with their past, contemplating paths not taken, maybe thinking about the role chance plays in the paths our lives take. So much of Lara\u2019s story comes down to these seemingly tiny details of life, such as the way she lands the first role as Emily, how she ends up at Tom Lake, or how that summer ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At a certain point in your life, if you\u2019re lucky enough to live long enough, you become an observer as well as a participant: you live with your memories, good and bad, and in retelling them you choose what to include and what to omit, especially when telling your children. Lara makes those choices, holding back some information for the pleasure of surprising her daughters with the reveals, and then holding back some information forever, including the last time she saw Duke before the pandemic hit. (It\u2019s also the one sour note in the novel, certainly the least realistic moment, and a drastic tonal shift from what\u2019s come before, although it\u2019s possible that that was an intentional contrast between the sepia-toned filter of our memories and the harshness of reality.) We curate our pasts for our children, much as we curate our lives for social media. Lara\u2019s daughters are all adults, each unique and each very well-drawn, yet she still only shows them a portion of herself and is thoughtful about what she excludes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As always, Patchett has created a whole cast of fully-realized characters; the three daughters each have their own personalities, goals, and values, each sharing a little something from their mom and yet also baffling her in ways in which they differ both from her and from each other. If she were Marilynne Robinson, another of my favorite contemporary novelists, each of these girls would get her own spinoff novel, but alas, Patchett has never (to my knowledge) revisited any of her prior creations. Lara\u2019s husband appears a little later on, a little less three-dimensional than the women in the family or the Duke of Lara\u2019s memories, although that\u2019s also clearly part of the point \u2013 he\u2019s the steady man Lara married after her dalliance with the unreliable bad boy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve read all of Patchett\u2019s novels, and Bel Canto<\/em> is the clear leader for me, still, but I could at least make an argument for Tom Lake <\/em>to be in the #2 position. After a week or so of pondering this, I came down at Commonwealth <\/em>second, The Dutch House <\/em>third, and Tom Lake <\/em>fourth over State of Wonder. <\/em>At her best, she gives us a cast of wonderful, realistic characters, and wraps them up in a plot that\u2019s realistic but compelling. Tom Lake<\/em> might show her in a more mature, meditative mood, but her prose and her characterization is as strong as ever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ann Patchett remains one of my favorite contemporary novelists; I think she\u2019s only missed once, really, with Run, which was too heavy-handed in its political allegory, and Taft is probably the weakest of the remainder even though it\u2019s above the line for me. Bel Canto remains her magnum opus and one of the best works […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1359,36,512,684,161],"class_list":["post-9997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2023-novels","tag-american-literature","tag-ann-patchett","tag-contemporary-novels","tag-highly-recommended","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9997"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9997\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9998,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9997\/revisions\/9998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}