Ann Patchett’s fourth novel, the hostage drama Bel Canto, propelled her to literary fame in 2001, winning the Women’s prize for fiction. Two solid novels followed, Run and State of Wonder, but Patchett has produced the best fiction of her career in recent years, with the magnificent family dramas Commonwealth (2016) and The Dutch House (2019), a finalist for the Pulitzer prize. There has been nonfiction, too, with two essay collections, including These Precious Days (2021), the centrepiece of which is a Harper’s magazine piece that went viral about Patchett’s lockdown friendship with Tom Hanks’s assistant, Sooki Raphael. Raphael moved into Patchett’s Nashville home to start a clinical trial for the recurrent pancreatic cancer that would ultimately end her life, and Patchett turned this into a deep exploration of kindness, death and resilience.
The key to Patchett’s appeal, both in essays and novels, is her very particular tone: decent, steady, unthreatening, with a low hum of intelligence that is somehow rooted in the old-fashioned, friendly but steely American decorum that spawned Louisa May Alcott – and, indeed, Tom Hanks (who, incidentally, narrates the audiobook of The Dutch House). A solid determination to see the good in people, even those who behave badly, generates a feeling that humanity may be salvageable after all. Throw in impressive storytelling skills and an ability to harness and control narrative and thematic complexities, and the result is transporting, intelligent, accessible fiction.
