‘Tom Lake’ Review: Ann Patchett’s Spotlight on the Past

‘Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?” The question, posed in the final act of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” by 25-year-old Emily Webb Gibbs, who has recently died in childbirth, underpins Ann Patchett’s radiant ninth novel, in which Wilder’s ever-popular 1938 drama figures prominently.

The narrator of “Tom Lake,” New Hampshire-born Lara Kenison, was such a natural in the role of Wilder’s small-town New Hampshire girl that she played the part three times between the ages of 16 and 25—the same span of Emily’s life covered by “Our Town.” Lara’s first two performances were in high school and college; the last was in Michigan’s Tom Lake theater company in 1988.

Three decades later, when Lara’s three grown daughters return to the family’s northern Michigan apple and cherry farm to shelter from the Covid pandemic, she is reminded how life-changing her experiences playing “Our Town” were. Despite the current world crisis, Lara is thrilled to have her girls back home—not least because, lacking seasonal workers during lockdown, the family must harvest the fruit themselves. To help pass the time while hand-picking row upon row of sweet cherries, Lara agrees to tell them about her romance with an actor recently in the news whom she met at Tom Lake. Peter Duke went on to great fame, while Lara, although a rising star, decided to quit acting after some troubling events that summer.

Three sisters in a cherry orchard? The playwright who springs to mind is not Thornton Wilder but Anton Chekhov. Indeed, “Tom Lake” carries echoes of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” and “Three Sisters,” including the challenges of holding onto family land, a determination to seek meaningful lives through work, and the young women’s ennui and yearning to escape the boonies—though Lara’s two younger daughters pine not for Moscow but for their interrupted pursuits, veterinary school and an acting career. (Her oldest daughter, Emily, is slated to take over the farm.)

Despite its Chekhovian themes, “Tom Lake” owes more to “Our Town,” which Wilder once described succinctly in a preface as “an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.” Ms. Patchett’s novel celebrates quotidian pleasures—such as the sight of 80-foot hemlocks in the woods that stand between the orchard and the shore of Lake Michigan’s Grand Traverse Bay, or the sound of Lara’s reunited daughters singing “Good night, good night, good night” as they knock against each other going up to bed after a long day in the orchard.

Lara spins a meandering, leisurely story about her nascent acting career and her passage into adulthood. She takes her sweet time describing the laughable auditions by local townspeople in her first amateur production, which taught her “nothing less than how to present myself in the world,” and a stint out in Hollywood, where her biggest thrill was being chauffeured around in limos. Her daughters grow restless during her stroll down memory lane, impatient for juicy details about her affair with Duke. “All three girls are in their twenties now, and for all their evolution and ostensible liberation, they have no interest in a story that is not about a handsome, famous man,” Lara says. “Still, I am their mother, and they understand that they will have to endure me in order to get to him.”

Lara resolutely resumes her tale at her own pace, “knowing full well that the parts they’re waiting to hear are the parts I’m never going to tell them.” The attention she lavishes on her early exploits may test readers’ patience, too, but the slow build is worth the wait.

In fact, the result is a master class in narrative—and parental!—control. Ms. Patchett glides easily between past and present, manipulating the rate and timing of the release of key information for maximum effect—such as one character’s identity, and news of another’s untimely demise. Lara admits to readers but not her daughters her decision to withhold some particulars, mainly sexual. “I want them to think I was better than I was,” she remarks, “and I want to tell them the truth in case the truth will be useful. Those two desires do not neatly coexist . . .” Later, Lara shares with readers a mortifying encounter with Duke that she’s determined her family will never know about. “I’ve given my girls the director’s cut,” she says.

In “Bel Canto,” her bestselling fourth novel, Ms. Patchett created a society in microcosm formed by a group of South American terrorists and the high-profile executives, politicians and opera singer they have taken hostage. She does something similar with the enforced togetherness and compressed intensity of summer-stock theater, where Lara plays innocent Emily by night, rehearses Sam Shepard’s steamy “Fool for Love” by day (in which she feels woefully out of her comfort zone), and spends every free minute swimming in the lake or between the sheets with her charismatic but mentally unstable co-star.

With just enough details to convey the rigors and pressures of cherry farming, “Tom Lake” allows the author of “Commonwealth” and “The Dutch House” to get on with the business at which she truly excels: monitoring the ups and downs of family and group dynamics with sensitivity. Ms. Patchett is a writer of enormous warmth who has written frequently about children struggling to find their place in blended families. In “Tom Lake,” as in her lovely essay “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage,” she demonstrates that happy, cohesive families can be just as interesting as unhappy, fractured ones. Her novel encompasses not just sometimes prickly mother-daughter relationships but the difficulty even well-adjusted young adults have in wrapping their heads around the fact that their parents led lives full of dreams, passions, tedium, triumphs, mistakes, heartbreaks—and, yes, sex—before they were born.

In “Our Town,” one of Emily’s deceased neighbors in the Grover’s Corners graveyard comments bitterly that, far from living mindfully, for most people, to be alive is “to move about in a cloud of ignorance” and “spend and waste time as though you had a million years.”

The message Lara hopes to impart to her daughters is that, while she may have been ignorant and blinded by passion in her youth, over the years she has come to understand the lessons of Wilder’s play. “It’s not that I’m unaware of the suffering and soon-to-be-more suffering in the world,” she says, “it’s that I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true.”

Sequestered with her family during an ominous time, Ms. Patchett’s utterly appealing character is determined to appreciate even ephemeral and throwaway moments to the fullest, to “see it all and hold it for as long as I can.”

—Ms. McAlpin reviews books regularly for the Journal, the Christian Science Monitor and NPR.org.