Tom Lake

Tom Lake: A Novel

Ann Patchett (2023, Harper Collins)

    Sixteen-year-old Laura showed up at auditions for Our Town just to help out at the registration table. But you never know: watching the first people trying out gave her a strong sense that she could do a better job, so she filled out a form (casually dropping the ‘u’ from her name), stood still for a Polaroid headshot, and won the role of Emily for the first time.

    That’s chapter one of the story the now fifty-something Lara is telling her three daughters in the summer of 2020. They have a good deal of time for stories, because they are all home in Michigan, on the family cherry farm, working long days to get the sweet fruit in. There aren’t as many migrant fruit pickers as usual, but the daughters have been in these orchards all their lives. It’s familiar work, in beautiful circumstances.

    The story they want is how their mother knew Peter Duke, before he went on to become a dream-boat movie star. A decade before, when they were emerging teenagers, their father had dropped a bombshell: “You know your mother used to date him.” Since they’re now nearly as old as Lara was then, they want the real story. And she’ll give it to them, though not exactly all of it.

    Peter and Lara were thrown together in a season of summer stock at Tom Lake, a pretty little Michigan town whose theater provides work for up-and-coming actors; it’s also a refuge for third-rate television stars whose names will sell tickets. Lara is tapped to play Emily because she knows the part; she’s actually been to Hollywood and made a movie already, but this role is really her wheelhouse.

     Peter is to play her father, Editor Webb. He’s not yet famous, but he’s easily the most charismatic and athletic man in the company, the sort of fellow who can do a handstand on the back of a chair, in the middle of a conversation. Such casual physicality is part and parcel of the intensity of the compressed summer season. The actors indulge in lunchtime swimming and evening tennis, drinking and late nights, romances and betrayals, as though they’ll be twenty-four forever. It’s in the nature of such bubbles, however, to pop and be gone.

     Though her one movie was an artistic success, Lara is thoroughly content to have wound up as a wife and mother in northern Michigan. The setting is an intentional nod to Chekhov; as in The Cherry Orchard, developers “are the enemies of stone fruit. They would leave just enough trees in the ground to justify calling the place Cherry Hills or Cherry Lane, then pull the rest up and build pretty white summer houses with picture windows and wraparound porches, places we could never afford.”

     At best, growing fruit is a tough business: sometimes the crop fails. Other times, everyone grows so much that the price craters, and nobody makes any money. “The farm is either the very paradise of Eden or a crushing burden of disappointment and despair manifested in fruit, depending on the day. I would love to leave my child Eden. The other stuff, less so.” 

    As surely as anything, though, you can’t leave your child only one side of the coin. For every first-act Emily, the smartest girl in school, there’s a third-act Emily, dying in childbirth, leaving a young husband who doesn’t know what hit him. Like Our Town, this book is about growth, change, and memory. It’s about how lovely the ordinary is, and how fleeting; and also how mothers and daughters can never fully know each other’s stories.

Feb 1, 2024