Emma's Reviews > Tom Lake

I wanted to give this a 4.5, and I couldn't. I'm going to have to give it a 5. Ann Patchett, who is uniformly excellent at writing about messy, sprawling families and years-long histories between people who meet by chance, has actually managed to outdo herself here.

This is a pandemic novel, but barely. The later timeline is set in spring 2020, but the setting, the family's beloved cherry orchard in northern Michigan, is about as idyllic as 2020 ever got. The timeline of the past is a theater company in the 1980s. You'd think that one or the other of these timelines would become the more interesting, but Patchett is cleverer than that. As Lara says, the story she tells her daughters is really a story about herself, and in the present, despite being a mother of three, she is still very much herself. Her daughters and husband are such crisp characters in her narration that you never begrudge returning to them, but the story's core is always the person Lara became.

I understand some of the negative reviews of Tom Lake because I think people expected something more shocking than what they got. Don't let the thriller-y blurb fool you; Tom Lake is wistful, often sardonic, but rarely bitter. It's the story of what it is to be right for a part, but wrong for a career. It's an elegy for a person you barely knew, who for you might have just epitomized a wonderful summer, but stood on his own, full of foibles and flaws you weren't there long enough to truly understand. It's a story of giving up on dreams, and why reality can be better. In short, it's optimistic, but not toxically positive. It is nearly perfect.

I almost took off a half star because I thought there was a little too much play stuff in the middle. Now I want to reread the whole thing and see what I can learn from what I might have missed.

Also, most of this is about various productions of Our Town, but read this book even if you know nothing about the play, or honestly, even if you hate it. It's that damn good.

Note on the format: I listened to the audiobook, read by Meryl Streep. She is, unsurprisingly, spectacular.