Tom Lake
In the spring of 2020, set at a serene cherry farm in Michigan, Lara and her family do what so many of us did when the world shut down: they rely on the power of storytelling to pass the time.
The Zammer Review: 4 out of 5 stars.
Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake is an ode to the play Our Town, Michigan, and past lives. In the spring of 2020, Lara and her husband need help on their farm since all the workers have gone home, so they recruit their daughters to help pick the cherries. Her daughters, having just moved back home in their twenties, feel their lives are on hold. While the pandemic rages on, they are hungry to hear about their mother’s exciting youth as an aspiring actress, including when she dated the famous movie star, Peter Duke. Thus, Lara tells her three daughters about the summer she spent as a young woman at a summer stock production of Our Town at the Tom Lake theater company in northern Michigan.
It’s always a delight to read a book whose inception seems tied to its setting rather than its characters, and Tom Lake is a beautiful example of that. Lara weaves a simple but rich story that ultimately chronicles her journey from New Hampshire to a Michigan farm, with Tom Lake and Our Town playing pivotal roles.
“Ask that girl who left Tom Lake what she wanted out of life and she would never in a million years have said the … farm in Traverse City, Michigan, but as it turned out, it was all she wanted.”
Lara recounts her short-lived romance with Peter Duke at Tom Lake before he became a household name. Her daughters, barely much older than she was when she met “Duke”, are astounded that Lara brushed with fame and turned away from the opportunity to have her own successful Hollywood career. But Lara, thirty-something years removed from that summer, knows more than her daughters about life.
“I look at my girls, my brilliant young women. I want them to think I was better than I was, and I want to tell them the truth in case the truth will be useful. Those two desires to not neatly coexist, but this is where we are in the story.”
The ladies in my book club are part of Lara’s generation and appreciated reflecting on their own lives and how they share them with their children. I am the age of Lara’s daughters, so I was fascinated by her storied past and comforted that she could easily change her life in a moment.
As another young person whose life froze during the pandemic, I think that is part of Lara’s daughters’ desperation to hear her story. The knowledge that Lara’s life took a 180-degree turn and she is happy and satisfied with it lessens the sting of feeling like life is passing by. Lara’s story functions as a fable whose message is “It all works out.”
This novel is funny. Don’t read it if you hate fun. Lara’s a smart ass in her youth, and I love that in a character. Her story is compelling on its own, but her daughters’ impatience to hear it is a clever way to characterize her daughters and dangle a carrot to the reader to keep reading.
I’m giving this four out of five stars because it is a comforting piece that is easy to breeze through, has stunning descriptions of settings, and though it switches between the 80s and 2020, has a slowness that feels classic.