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.
