Another great read from Ann Patchett. I loved The Dutch House, so was minded to enjoy this new work. And I did, though maybe not quite as much.
Tom Lake is really a tribute to Thornton Wilder, who is a bit out of my frame, not being a big reader of Americana, but no matter. The story centres around his play, Our Town, that feels very pancakes-on-the-griddle homely and probably doesn’t have the connotations for non-Americans that those folksy folk enjoy. Our narrator, Lara, finds herself (almost accidentally) type-cast as the fresh faced young woman in Our Town, first in her home town and later at Tom Lake, a theatre company in Michigan. She is Emily, the sweet thing. She can’t seem to pull off anything else.
The setting of the main story is years later, with Lara at home on the cherry orchard with her husband and daughters, during covid. They have few workers, it’s harvest and there is nothing to do but work frantically to bring in the crop and tell stories. Covid is nothing more than a useful situation for Lara’s three adult girls to return home and enjoy some unexpectedly intimate time with their mother, and to persuade her to reveal stories from her youth. Particularly the time when she was acting at Tom Lake and in love with fellow actor Duke, who later turns in to a mega-star the girls are a bit obsessed with – to the extent that Emily, the eldest, believes him to be her father.
We flick back to the story-within-a-story, and to Tom Lake, where the action happens. Duke is handsome and talented and casual with his heart. He picks up Lara immediately and moves in, as her appointed room is nicer than his. They rehearse, Lara befriends her understudy, Pallace, who is gorgeous and Duke’s visiting brother, a tennis star, hooks up with her. They’re all beautiful and nothing can touch them. They swim in the lake, they hang out, they drink, the play opening gets closer. There is an intensity about every day.
Lara and Duke have a passionate love affair, and she’s open about this with her girls when retelling the history, she says she’ll tell them everything but the sex. She explains the feelings she had for Duke, how he lifted her up and her expectation to be let down, how it didn’t hurt because she know it would happen, and how it did hurt, because she still loved him. How it was the play director, Joe – the man now picking cherries in the orchard with them, their father –who offered a different kind of love. A longevity of love. A love as strong as their love of the orchard and the cherry trees, with their beauty and abundant fruit.
The writing is top quality, of course. It’s Ann Patchett! She puts us right into every scene. Ever been on stage? It feels like this: “Backstage was dark and the houselights were up. From where we stood we could see the people milling around, looking for their seats. They always made me think of chickens, like a truck had backed up to the theater door and emptied four hundred chickens into the house.”
Lara grows out of her Emily role and grows out of being the girl who was in love with Duke. “No one gets to go on playing Emily forever,” is a nod to her passing youth, and she is careful that the girls understand that what she has now, with the three of them and their (long suffering?) father, and the cherry orchard is everything she could possibly want.
A satisfying story about different kinds of love: a wild love, a secure love, and about the love of a mother and her daughters.
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