Tom Lake Charming, but a One-Trick Pony

 

Tom Lake (2023)

By Ann Patchett

Harper, 320 pages.

★★★

 

 

 

Public school teachers and parents will recognize these scenarios. A student sees you downtown is startled that you’re wearing jeans and sneakers. Do you remember when you assumed your parents had no lives before you came along? To be fair, it’s often hard to imagine someone outside of their customary roles.

 

That’s the central premise of Tom Lake, the latest novel from Ann Patchett, which is  riding high on best-seller lists. It centers on Joe and Lara Nelson, a happily married couple with three young adult children: Emily, Maisie, and Nell. Except for Emily, who wants to stay local, each will soon fly the proverbial coop. In the present they are together on the shores of Lake Michigan, where the Nelsons tend their fruit orchards. Picking a cherry crop is so labor intensive that the daughters wile away the hours by picking Lara’s brain about her years before she married. They know bits and pieces, including that she once dated Peter Duke, an actor who became famous and won an Oscar. In her sullen teen years, Emily imagined that Peter was her real father and would show up to take her away from the farm. Irony alert: Now she’s engaged to the proverbial boy next door and wants to run the orchard when her parents retire. Maisie has her eyes set on becoming a veterinarian and Nell thinks she might take up acting.

 

A story within a story is not exactly the most original premise in literature, but Patchett has written a charming PG-13 novel. Tom Lake riffs off Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. When she was a misunderstood high school kid in Durham, New Hampshire, bucked up by her grandmother Nell, Lara played Emily in Our Town and did so again in college. She was so good that she caught the eye of an avuncular Hollywood agent who sent her to Los Angeles to make a movie. Quite a few completed movies either never get released, or rest in limbo until financing, post production, and distribution issues are ironed out. In the lull, Lara is sent to New York to try out for a Spalding Gray production of Our Town. She did not get the part, so her agent suggested she do summer stock to develop her chops.

 

The novel’s namesake body of water is Tom Lake, Michigan, home to a venerable stage reminiscent of summer theatre in the Berkshires. As it happens, they are doing Our Town and their Emily has just left the cast. Twenty-four-year-old Lara steps in and wows the cast. Before the day is out, she’s sleeping with Peter Duke, four years her elder and  a privileged carefree hunk. Lara recounts her past in pieces and dribbles as she ponders what to confess. Her daughters have seen her film and would not be shocked about sex, but maybe there are parts of her past that Lara prefers to remain private.

 

Legends abound of summer stock drama and trauma that’s not on the stage. The Tom Lake cast is no exception. It was certainly an interesting group: Lara’s black understudy and friend Pallace; Albert, an older actor whom everyone called Uncle Wallace who is overly fond of the bottle; visits from Peter’s older brother Sebastian, a tennis pro; and a director whose Aunt Maisie and Uncle Ken run a cherry farm in Michigan. When part of the cast pays a visit to it, Peter likes it so much he wants to stay. There’s a Great Expectations twist to that trip, and later a break-a-leg moment.

 

In all, Lara had a life-altering summer, and a few subsequent hookups with Peter. But after returning to New York and realizing that Emily was the only role at which she excelled, Lara quit acting. She married Joe Nelson, had three daughters, and never looked back. Of course, her daughters doubt that she had no regrets, but it’s often hard for children to imagine anyone opting for a non-glamorous life. There are also revelations about Joe’s youthful digressions that bring matters into focus and a hint of hold-your-doubts equivocation.

 

Patchett is a gifted writer, but it must be said that Tom Lake is a one-trick pony, a musing on Our Town, which is itself a play within a play. Tom Lake is thus a skillfully written contrivance with many of Wilder’s characters reborn in Michigan. Score it high on the literary scale but middling for originality.    

 

Rob Weir