In This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, an essay from 2011 in which she considers the vicissitudes of contentment, Ann Patchett writes that children have “a real failure of imagination when it comes to thinking of the adults in their lives as having done anything of interest, anything at all, in the time known as before”. Such a state, she suggests, leaves us ill-prepared for the realisation, sharp but inevitable, that our parents, too, may have their secrets. At best, we’re unnerved, something solid now made to seem suddenly shaky. At worst, we indulge in an outburst of sententiousness, priggish to a fault. We need our parents to be better than us – and if they cannot be that, then at least they should be less exciting.
In her strangely peaceable new novel, Tom Lake, Patchett gives us Lara Nelson and her three adult daughters: Emily, who will one day take over the family cherry farm; Maisie, who is studying to be a vet; and Nell, who hopes to be an actor, as her mother once was. For these girls, however, it is not a failure of imagination that troubles them so much as a surfeit. For most of their lives, they’ve known that Lara once dated Peter Duke, an actor who would later win an Oscar, news that was broken to them ever so casually by their father, Joe, as they watched one of his old films as children. But in the absence of crucial details – up to now, their mother has been frustratingly sketchy – the beautiful, charismatic Duke has colonised their minds, clambering over everything like weeds at the edge of the orchard. They’re fixated on him, these young women, and with their own futures now opening out before them, they demand to know everything. Lara must spill.
Luckily, there is the time for this. Tom Lake is set during the pandemic. Thanks to the lockdown, the Nelson girls are all at home helping with the cherry harvest; Lara’s story, told in daily instalments, will be better than any podcast at easing them through the long, back-breaking days. Patchett’s narrative, then, flips between present-day Michigan, and the same state in 1988, when Lara spent a summer not so far away at Tom Lake, where she starred opposite the young Duke in a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town – and, yes, as stories go, this one has pretty much everything, save perhaps for an unreliable narrator (if Lara keeps one important plot twist from her children, her mode so far as we’re concerned is as scrupulous as it is exquisitely controlled). Its subjects include fame, ambition, talent, lost love and the difference between so-called destiny and choice; the young Lara even goes to Hollywood, where she makes a cult movie.
But there’s something else as well. Aren’t her daughters so earnest and so vulnerable? They bruise as easily as ripe fruit. Spreading her memories out before her girls like an old embroidered tablecloth, Lara hopes to show them that those moments in her life when all seemed lost (or won) were not, after all, so definitive. In the end, she thinks to herself, so much is forgotten: “The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else.”
Meryl Streep will read the audio book of Tom Lake, and I can just imagine how she’ll do it, every line delivered in her best Bridges of Madison County voice (different state, I know, but you will catch my meaning). There is something folksy about this novel – a plain-speaking sagacity I occasionally found glib – and it is braided, too, with a ribbon of sentimentality not even its denouement can quite cut (while this particular turn did not shock or even surprise me, it will strike some readers as acidic). I should say also that at least in the beginning, I found the constant interruptions to the story of Duke (the mythology of Duke!) caused by the comings and goings at the Nelson’s cherry orchard very frustrating. Cut to the bit where you have sex with the floppy-haired film star, Lara! I kept thinking – a response not dissimilar to that of her daughters, who often weary of her throat-clearing, her need to circle right back to the beginning of things.
But such frustrations do not last. The reader comes to understand how integral they are to Patchett’s purpose, which has to do in part with the nature of storytelling. She knows exactly what she’s doing, just how much to say or withhold. While I can’t help but hanker for the wilder, more gorgeously outlandish Patchett of Bel Canto and State of Wonder, I also see that in this – a later, quieter book – she is pulling off a trick at least as daring, which is to take the temperature of a whole life, and by doing so, to prioritise happiness over misery, an emotion on which the novel often struggles to thrive. I would tell you there is something epiphanic about Tom Lake, only that adjective won’t do at all, for the understanding comes, not in some soaring climax, but cumulatively, across many moments, each one brimful of the half glimpsed, the almost understood. Lara’s middle age and all it has brought her is not consolatory. Out in that cherry orchard, she will come to see that she has all she ever wanted. But for the reader, it surely is. We can only hope it will be the same way for us, our mistakes and hurts, having first faded to grey, now carefully repurposed as our very best stories.
• Tom Lake by Ann Patchett is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
