Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake sucked me up and spat me out a few days later. The sort of book you don’t notice you’re reading until hours later and you have turned prune in the tub or the clock is – traitorously – telling you its well past your very last possible bedtime. Which is strange because it’s not a book that’s “about” very much. Which is to say it isn’t very plot-y. It is instead a book about how we become, how events that once shook us fade into memories we can only loosely sketch the contours of later.
On its surface the story is that of Lara and how she was briefly an actor, briefly going to be a very famous actor, briefly the lover of an eventually very famous actor Peter Duke, briefly someone else. A story she is parcelling out for her adult daughters as they work the days of pandemic lockdowns on their (albeit occasionally-overly-pastoral-and-idealized even though it is supposed to be pastoral and idealized) family farm.
There’s a beautiful scene where Lara is explaining to her daughters why she doesn’t regret or question the decision (though it wasn’t really her decision and on every occasion where she’s offered the chance she still chooses Peter?) to leave Peter and be with their father, plainer-than-steady-reliable Joe. She explains it something like Peter is a carnival ride – wild, epic entertainment, but always going to leave you feeling sick and disoriented and so you’re relieved to get away. It’s mostly persuasive. The reader doesn’t question that Lara now – Lara of three grown children and an established farm – doubts anything about Joe. Their relationship reads as perfectly solid and deep (and probably overly pastoral and idealized). And still it’s surprising that this wild ride of Peter Duke can be so thoroughly – seemingly – parcelled as fond memory instead of what he is – a symbol for an alternate life she could have led, another path had only small changes happened or not.
It is, of course, the mirror to the reader – an invitation to cast back across the life to ask where these moments of rupture and decision have been and will be. Deliberate words there – rupture and decision – those moments that change is made for us and those where we (apparently) exercise some direction on what will come next.
So, too, the reader gets to reexamine for themselves the way in which the experience of cataclysmic event – a pandemic – becomes, necessarily, something we remember with distant curiosity: do you remember when we wiped all the cereal boxes with lysol wipes before the came into the house? As if we can forget the terror of uncertainty and interminability that accompanied that particular distorted time for the privileged (me) that experienced it from within my home.
For Lara the remembered story within the lockdown days of the ruptured change of her summer at Tom Lake offers us that promise and threat: it’s all change; none of this will last.
In that theme it is also a book of parenting and death: my favourites. Many scenes of her recollection of her daughters as small children with sticky hands – (let us agree this is an image that has Done Its Time and can be retired, even while yes, many toddlers do have sticky hands) and brutal awareness of their Full Adulthood, the way in which that ‘longest shortest time’ wrenches the parent in the repetition of the call to cherish it, to savour it, to hold on to it – as if we didn’t know, is if we weren’t constantly pressingly impossibly aware of how temporary and tender it is.
And how we will full circle to the graveyard that holds the generations of the family on the farm (but will it if Emily maintains that children shouldn’t be born into a world so fractured? And isn’t she right?) – so sacred in its promise of final redemption that Peter Duke pays untold dollars for the privilege of burial there – and the promise that all of them, all of us, meet there as what can we do but watch on double time the inevitability of the change.
Savour this one then and – certainly, as it was always certain – enjoy the end.
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