Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

Tom Lake is the second Ann Patchett book I’ve read (Bel Canto being the first). I purchased it on a whim at the Auckland Writer’s Festival back in May. I read it slowly, savouring each chapter like a delicious meal or glass of wine. I’m usually a speed reader, but there was something about this book — set during the height of the Covid pandemic on a cherry farm in northern Michigan — that compelled me to give it space to percolate.

The novel’s protagonist is Lara Nelson, a stage actress-turned-cherry-farmer, who dated a man in her early 20s before he went on to become a super famous movie star. When Lara, her husband Joe, and their three adult daughters Emily, Maisie, and Nell, all find themselves unexpectedly back under one roof during the pandemic, her daughters beg for Lara to recount her whirlwind romance with the legendary Peter Duke.

“It’s about falling so wildly in love with him—the way one will at twenty-four—that it felt like jumping off a roof at midnight. There was no way to foresee the mess it would come to in the end, nor did it occur to me to care.”

And so we, the readers, are transported between domestic life during the pandemic (which brings up all sorts of bittersweet nostalgia) and Lara’s glittering early 20s, where she was an up-and-coming stage actress playing the lead role of Emily in Our Town at a location called Tom Lake.

We get to know young Lara, full of quiet ambition and self-doubt, and present-day Lara, so content in her choices that she yearns for things to stay the same — but it’s a pandemic, her daughters are adults now, and change is the only certainty.

“At the edge of our woods is the shore of Grand Traverse Bay, our corner of the choppy, gray-blue behemoth that is Lake Michigan — the dark stand of the woods, and then a dozen feet of pebbly, sandy beach, and then the water that stretches out forever; the trees and then our eldest daughter alone on the beach, hugging her knees. I sit beside her and she tips herself into me, her head on my shoulder, her glorious hair falling across my chest, and for what feels like a very long time we watch the cormorants skim the water. ‘Everything should stay like this,’ she says. I tell her that I wish it could, even though I know she means the temperature of the lake and I mean this summer, everyone home and together. As sad as I am for the suffering of the world, I wish to keep this exact moment, Emily on the beach in my arms.”

As a 33-year-old, I fall somewhere in the middle of the characters — I’m years beyond Lara’s daughters in their early 20s, but with so much ahead of me before I reach Lara’s present age of 57. I related most to Lara’s brief but searingly accurate recounts of mothering three small children. The rawness, the beauty, the pain, the warmth. I only have two children, but I could see the scenes Patchett painted for me as if they were my own — the mess, the long days and sleepless nights, the sticky fingers and sweet kisses, the feeling of being broken but whole at the same time.

“I was partial to fall because I liked the sharpness of the air and the brightness of the light of the leaves. The kitchen was still small in those days and I kept the girls in there with me while I peeled potatoes for dinner. They were making jam tarts, which meant they were searing jam into their hair.”

Part of the appeal of Tom Lake is it’s as much about looking back as it is about looking forward. Lara and her family are on the precipice of a new way of life. What does the future hold? What will happen after the pandemic? Will the cherry farm survive? Climate change is omnipresent throughout, which gives the novel weight — this isn’t a light romance or summer read, it’s a novel about the fragility and chaos of life and finding purpose, any purpose, to hold you steady.

“Emily picks up a fork and balances it on one finger. She looks at nothing but the fork. ‘I can eat vegetables and ride my bike and stop using plastic bags but I know I’m just doing it to keep myself from going crazy. The planet is fucked. There’s nothing I can do about that. But I’ll tell you what, I’m going to spend my life trying to save this farm. If anybody ever wonders what I’m here for, that’s it’.”

Tom Lake is persistent in its reminders that life is short. When you are very young, you think there are 1,000 roads you might travel — but more often than not, you pick a path or two, maybe three. And you realise life is not about shapeshifting, but about learning to become comfortable in your own skin, your one true and constant home.

“I am fifty-seven. I am twenty-four.”