Ann Patchett is everywhere

Plus more summer reading, and giveaway winners

An Ann Patchett novel is an automatic buy for me, as it is for millions of other readers, and she seems to be everywhere right now, in the media and on her book tour for Tom Lake. I was thrilled to go see Ann Patchett in person this week in Concord, NH, in conversation with her friend, essayist Katrina Kenison.

Ann Patchett was greeted by a full house, an enthusiastic audience ready to listen. Her latest novel Tom Lake got its start in New Hampshire, she said: four years ago, while on book tour for The Dutch House, Ann Patchett was visiting her friend (and interviewer) Katrina Kenison in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and she mentioned that she wanted to write a novel that referenced Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. (Wilder wrote Our Town while he was in Peterborough.) Kenison told Patchett her own story of a teenage crush while acting in a community-theater production of Our Town in Milford, NH, in the 1970s, and that kernel got added to the novel’s first glimmers.

When asked about themes in her writing, Patchett said she finds herself returning in her novels to themes of family and confinement—“it’s impossible to completely dissolve those bonds,” even when family members are estranged, she said. She said she’s also preoccupied with class, poverty, and wealth.

I remembered something Ann Patchett said the last time she visited Concord, four years ago, for The Dutch House. It struck me, and I’m sharing it again because it feels true:

Writing the first draft of a novel, she said, is “like swimming the English Channel—you can’t look back, you can’t really look ahead, you just keep going. Only later can you step back and see what you’ve got.”

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Coincidentally, I was assigned to review Tom Lake for BookPage’s August issue. Here’s the review, below:

Ann Patchett once again proves herself a master of the family narrative in Tom Lake, which, like her previous novels The Dutch House and Commonwealth, spans decades yet still feels intimate, offering well-drawn characters and finely paced revelations.

The novel seems to open in the middle of things: “That Veronica and I were given keys and told to come early on a frozen Saturday in April to open the school for the Our Town auditions was proof of our dull reliability.” We soon learn that we’re at the beginning of a story told by narrator Lara Nelson—or more precisely, her backstory, which takes place in early 1980s New Hampshire. 

Tom Lake is a dual-timeline novel, moving seamlessly between the pivotal summer of 1984 and present-day scenes set amid the late spring of 2020, the first COVID-19 pandemic spring, when Lara and husband Joe’s three 20-something daughters have come home to the family cherry orchard in northern Michigan. Seasonal workers can’t get to the farm, so while Lara and daughters Emily, Maisie and Nell spend long days picking cherries, Lara agrees to recount her long-ago romance with movie star Peter Duke. In 1984, 24-year-old Lara is cast as Emily in a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town at a summer-stock theater in Tom Lake, Michigan, and she finds herself deep in a whirlwind romance with charismatic fellow cast member Peter. He goes on to become a famous actor, while Lara goes on to become a farmer, wife and mom. 

Lara tells her story episodically, keeping her daughters (and us) waiting for more. The novel’s evocation of a mid-’80s summer-stock theater, its big and small dramas, feels both well inhabited and fresh, seen through the perspectives of both the younger Lara, who’s propelled into ingenue roles through some lucky breaks, and the older Lara, who keeps some details to herself. Through Lara’s give-and-take with her daughters, we get to know characters both present and past, and through Lara’s interiority and commentary, we also take in the Nelson family’s dynamics and the pleasures of a long marriage, as well as the regrets and might-have-beens.

The two timelines converge beautifully, and the revelations, when they come, feel both surprising and inevitable. Sometimes elegiac in tone, the novel threads the themes of Our Town and, to a lesser degree, Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard throughout: the passage of time, the inevitability of loss and death, and the beauty of an ordinary family and an ordinary life, wondrous and too brief. And as with Our Town’s community of Grover’s Corners, Tom Lake’s main settings of northern Michigan and New Hampshire feel timeless and archetypal, even a little fairy tale-ish. (If you’re an Our Town fan, you’ll also enjoy the novel’s references to other productions of the play, some of them nonfictional.) Tom Lake is a gorgeously layered novel, a meditation on love, family and the choices we make.

A book-reviewer friend who also reviewed and loved TOM LAKE says he suspects very few men will pick up this book. He’s probably right.

And last, this one’s for writers: Don’t miss Bianca Marais’ interview with Ann Patchett in this episode of The Shit No One Tells You About Writing. It’s fantastic, and Patchett talks about her own missteps and false starts in writing, and all the rules she’s broken, or else never knew about. This episode also includes a great interview with novelist Ramona Ausubel.

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Summer reading report

I’m more than halfway through the audiobook of Abraham Verghese’s new novel The Covenant of Water, and while the narration is stellar—the author narrates, and he does a remarkable job with all the voices and accents—I wish I’d read the hardcover. As I mentioned a couple of issues ago, I like to sink into a long, 19th-centuryish novel in the summer, and The Covenant of Water is my doorstopper this summer. It’s a saga set on the West Coast of India, from the turn of the 20th century, through two wars, Partition, and on through the ‘60s, spanning generations and bringing unrelated characters together. A lot of humor, love, redemption, and plot, along with sharp commentary on British rule and the Indian class system—social justice is a theme. And Verghese is a physician, so some of his characters are too, and medical issues and details inform some of the storylines. And not least, it’s about 800 pages (or 31 hours in audio!) long.

Are you a re-reader?

What books, if any, do you reread? As a kid, I reread certain novels every summer, like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter and Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

As an adult, I reread old books (Mrs. Dalloway, EM Forster’s Howards End, any Jane Austen) and newer ones, like Elizabeth Strout’s Amy and Isabelle and Allegra Goodman’s Kaaterskill Falls. I’m not sure why I’ve reread these last two multiple times—maybe it’s because both are set in the summertime.

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✨⭐️🌟 Giveaway winners and a note of thanks ✨⭐️🌟

Congrats to Janie M. and Laura S., winners of The Wrong Kind of Woman paperback! The paperback version of The Wrong Kind of Woman has been out in the world for a year now, and I’m so grateful to readers, and booksellers, bookstagrammers, and book clubs. And of course I’m happy to speak with book clubs, virtually or in person.

And last, thank you to everyone who wrote such kind notes about our dogs, Lila and Frankie. I loved hearing your stories! 🐾