Tom Lake: A Novel
In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.
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Community Reviews
Ho hum. I found this book to be a whole lot of nothing. After I got past the disgusting first few chapters where teenage Lara shits on everyone coming to try out for the community theater in the past timeline and glories in having her daughters home even while people were being shoved into morgue vans, dead of Covid, in the present timeline, I found everything about this novel to be inoffensive. Nothing made any impact on me. There was plenty of stuff that was supposed to but it just kind of⦠fell flat for me. She ruptured her Achilles tendon? Hmm okay. She cried over her boyfriend ghosting her. Alrighty. The thing that got me the most was her vet daughter talking so callously about dead puppies. Other reviewers have mentioned this and I think theyâre right in that there doesnât seem to be any real pushback, rebellion, or questioning. Anything difficult gets kind of glossed over. Thereâs this whole bit about the eldest daughter doesnât want kids because climate change and the protagonist is like âbut everyone always thinks the worldâs going to endâ and her husband is like âyouâll change your mindâ and then someone is weeping but Iâm not totally sure why and then weâre done with that thread and have washed our hands of it. It doesnât ever feel like genuine emotion and I never felt moved by anything that happened in this novel (except the dead puppies). Iâm never sorry to have read something because it all adds to your life experiences but I could have not read this one and been just fine with the absence.
Listening to Lara recount her days at and surrounding Tom Lake was much like grabbing a well worn quilt and listening to your own mother. The perfect amount of nostalgia, surprises, secrets, and the lesson of how small decisions can change the trajectory of our lives. Meryl Streep was the perfect choice and I am already looking forward to my next time visiting this book. A beautiful way to end the summer.
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