Reading Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake is like taking a breath of fresh air scented by cherries from an orchard. It’s a fascinating revisiting of Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town, to boot.
Lara, a teenager who tries out for the part of Emily in Our Town on a whim, goes on to become an actress in Los Angeles. At age twenty-four, she has a brief affair with an actor who goes on to become a great actor while she realizes she is simply ordinary. She later falls in love with a cherry farmer, her great true love. During the pandemic, her three grown daughters return home to self-isolate. The family owns a cherry orchard and is trying to harvest their cherries, but due to the pandemic, they are missing many of their usual workers. As they pick, the daughters encourage their mother to tell them the story of her life in Hollywood and her affair with Peter Duke. The kids think they know the real story, but their expectations have led them to draw different versions of what happened to their mother. Lara manages to tell her story while keeping some parts an absolute secret and censoring the sex.
This is a sweet, tender, quiet book in a bucolic setting that still deals with major issues: motherhood, family, the pandemic, and the fates of the world, their orchard, and all humanity in the midst of climate change. I’ve also been inspired to reread Our Town.
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Tom Lake (Harper, August 1, 2023) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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