Book: Tom Lake

Author: Ann Patchett

Publication: Bloomsbury

Price: Rs 799

Simplicity is a translucent curtain, especially as a literary tool. When examined closely, it often reveals more than what meets the eye. Fiction uses this tactic to its advantage; the advantage of saying more with less. Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake is an exemplar of this ‘less is more’ philosophy.

With a global pandemic in the backdrop — and the looming uncertainty of a lockdown — Lara, her three daughters (Emily, Maisie, and Nell), and her husband, Joe, live on their family farm in Michigan. While the cherry farm demands special care, it also gives the family a chance to share their stories — stories that have brought them where they are in life right now. Lara is both the narrator and the subject of the story, but the lessons of the story are not hers alone. At 16, she drops the u in her name and performs on stage for the first time. At 24, she has been ‘discovered’, has debuted in a movie, spent months rehearsing and performing for a summer stock company, ‘Tom Lake’, and has fallen in and out of love. At 57, she recollects her brief adventures to her daughters and the lessons she has learnt. “There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it ...” muses Lara, grateful for the memories she kept and the ones she let go. Patchett endorses the safety of a long marriage as opposed to interesting, albeit short-lived, love affairs; and while she is not a mother, she accurately captures the essence of a mother-daughter relationship. A seasoned writer, she sets and resets the stage, among teenage ambition, passionate love, tragic losses, and their silver lining — “the beauty and the suffering” of life.

Patchett once said, “I’ve been writing the same book my whole life — that you’re in one family, and all of a sudden, you’re in another family, and it’s not your choice, and you can’t get out.” The readers can sense a familiarity — of the comforts and the discomforts of chosen families in unchosen circumstances — in her long line of work, from Bel Canto (the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Orange Prize for Fiction winner) to The Dutch House (the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist). Tom Lake, though, is more resilient. Despite being conscious of the pandemic, climate change and, to some extent, agricultural distress, it is as much a story of nostalgia as it is a story of a subtle, calm acceptance of life. Amidst the familiarity of family ties, Tom Lake explores the comforts of language and literature with references to Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town, Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love and, briefly, even Shakespeare’s King Lear. Theatre, both as medium and symbol of human conscience, is a large theme in Tom Lake. The cherry orchard, too, is a Chekhovian statement, even though it widely differs in its interpretation: for Chekhov, memory is the burden of the past, while Patchett uses the tool to relieve herself of its burdens. Although she keeps this dance between time and memory simple — rather than being eventful — Patchett’s writing reveals the truth of life: that it is windy and that it carries you as much as you carry it. This further proves that Patchett was rightfully awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2021 “for putting into words the beauty, pain, and complexity of human nature.”