A Pandemic Novel

The past few years have been shaped by an invisible enemy. While pandemics have riddled our history, the world was caught reeling on its knees when COVID-19 inundated everyone. Before it can be mitigated, it has already spread across the globe. Most of us were also skeptical about it, believing it to be the product of a grand conspiracy plan to control the world. Most of us thought that it would be over as quickly as it started. Lo and behold, the unimaginable happened. Flights were canceled. Countries were closing their borders. Governments were imposing protocols to limit the mobility of their denizens, hence, stymying the spread of the virus. Lockdowns have become prevalent.

Three years thence, we are through the worst part. Mass vaccination drives were critical in curtailing the further spread of the virus. The world has also learned to cope, adjusting to what everyone refers to as the “new normal”. Life, as we knew it before the pandemic, has resumed but remnants of the pandemic are still ubiquitous; the use of face masks is still prevalent. These remind us of the dark days that spanned from 2020 to 2021. Borders have opened up, increasing mobility. Malls and restaurants, which looked like ghost towns during the height of the pandemic, are again teeming with activities. Economies are slowly recovering from the slump caused by the pandemic. With the removal of mobility restrictions, traveling is again in vogue. Still, everyone is precautious.

The COVID-19 pandemic saw the advent of a new literary movement. The pandemic inspired what many refer to as the pandemic novel. Some novels captured life during the pandemic like Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence (2022). Some pandemic novels such as Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise and Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark painted grim pictures of cataclysms that will sweep the world. Meanwhile, works like Isabel Allende’s Violeta (2022) and Orhan Pamuk’s Nights of Plague (2021) dug further into the present by revisiting the past. One of the most recent writers to lend her voice to this growing movement is American writer Ann Patchett with her 2023 novel, Tom Lake.

“There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well.”

~ Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

Tom Lake is Patchett’s ninth novel and her first since The Dutch House (2019). The novel was set during 2020, the first year of the pandemic. Readers meet Lara Nelson who, along with her husband Joe, owned an orchard in northern Michigan. It was the cherry-picking season. The couple normally has seasonal laborers helping them with the cherry-picking. However, due to the restrictions on movement because of the lockdowns, half of the workers could not return to the orchard and help the Nelsons. The scarcity of labor prompted the Nelsons, along with their three adult daughters – Emily, Maisie, and Nell – who returned home due to the pandemic, to take on the job of picking and processing their own fruits themselves.

To bide the time and to provide a reprieve from the tediousness of their labor, Lara regaled her daughters with stories from her past. Due to the lockdown measures, it was not uncommon during the early days of the pandemic to find families and other individuals cooped up in enclosed spaces. This proximity, while forced, has allowed many of us to form or strengthen our bonds with our loved ones and those around us. The intimacy can be claustrophobic but with the pace of our lives slowed by the pandemic, it has also provided us opportunities to reflect on our lives. For Patchett who mastered the art of capturing the finer details of small circles – apparent in her popular novel Bel Canto – this proximity was a canvas upon which to draw inspiration.

While Lara had several anecdotes up her sleeve, one particular phase of her youth piqued the interest of her daughters. Ever since their father casually broke to them about their mother’s love affair with Peter Duke, an actor who would later win an Oscar award, their collective curiosity was aroused. The sisters wanted details from their mother of her brief acting career and, consequently, her summer love affair. However, Lara has been evasive, she either dismissed their probing questions or provided sketchy details. Meanwhile, Duke has started to inhabit their mind. They were preoccupied with the mysterious persona that was once an intimate part of their mother’s lives. Their patience finally paid off. Sans their coaxing, their mother opened up about her brief adventure on the screen and stage.

From the present, the story shifted to the 1980s. In the titular town of Tom Lake, a summer theater troupe was putting on a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The actress set to play Emily, the main character, unexpectedly dropped out. This provided an opportunity for Lara Kenison, a small-town girl; she auditioned for the same part in a Broadway production of Our Town but she did not make the cut. Moreover, Lara has no formal theater training but everyone saw in her the uncanny ability of portraying the role. Upon her arrival, her interests were immediately drawn toward Peter Duke, a twenty-eight-year-old man set to play Editor Webb, Emily’s father.

“The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.”

~ Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

When Lara and Peter first met, Peter was still a relatively unknown actor. However, through Lara’s recollections, Patchett painted the image of a man larger than life. Peter was talented and ambitious. He also had wild streaks but it was palpable that he was on his way to stardom. He was charismatic. There was an allure about him that drew Lara in. What ensued was a whirlwind summer romance. However, the flame tapered as quickly as it sparked after Lara had to step down from her role. The former lovers disconnected and slowly, Peter became simply a memory of the past. Several years later, Lara reconnected with Joe Nelson, the director of the Our Town production. They fell in love and the rest, they say, was history.

The underlying themes pertain to first love and lost love. Both can be bittersweet but lost loves more so. Many have even coined the term “the one that got away” (TOTGA) to refer to this kind of once-in-a-lifetime love. The story of Peter and Lara, however, does not reduce itself to a mere romance story. As their love story unfolded, the story explored the dynamics of fame, ambition, and talent. Watching Peter ooze with talent, charisma, and ambition came with Lara’s realization that she lacked the talent and ambition needed to propel her to the same heights as Peter would eventually achieve. Lara did venture to Hollywood where she experienced modest success with a cult movie.

The interplay of choices and destiny was prominently depicted in the story. In the stead of a career in the movies, Lara took on the role of motherhood. However, she slowly found herself in a complex family situation. She was constrained by this role and her relationship with her daughters was anything but simple. For instance, she was hurt by Emily’s secretive nature. She kept secret from her mother her and her boyfriend’s wedding date. This tipped the iceberg of many life events she did not disclose from her mother. Lara was also worried about Nell who decided to take on the same path as her mother once did. Nell aspired to be an actress while Maisie was settled in her chosen profession of being a veterinarian. The complex landscape of motherhood was vividly captured by Patchett. Despite its complexities, motherhood was a role that Lara reveled in.

Tom Lake provides the reader different forms of love. Romantic love was the most prevalent. We also read about marital love, of the comfort we find in the simple pleasures of being with the person we love the most. Joe was the loving husband and the perfect father, almost too perfect that he was safe from his daughters’ scathing criticisms of their mother. His presence, however, was almost immemorable. Other forms of love captured in the story include maternal love, the love of animals, and the love of nature. The love for stories and storytelling was also intricately woven into the fingerprints of Patchett’s ninth novel.

“There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well.”

~ Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

Tom Lake’s pace was deliberately slow, akin to the initial moments of the pandemic. The laidback atmosphere instigated by the pandemic was one that Lara reveled in although she knew she could not explicitly express it. For Patchett, it allowed her to craft a novel that aligns with the rest of her oeuvre. She has mastered the art of capturing the intricacies of close groups; it was at the forefront of the novel. Touchstones with current issues further enriched the story although, at times, this search for contemporary relevance was forced. The novel underscored climate change and the tumultuous state of world affairs. Racial discrimination was underscored through the fate of Pallas, Lara’s understudy for Our Town. Pallas shared the same flame and talent as Peter but she never got the same break as her male counterpart.

Tom Lake is a hallmark of Ann Patchett’s oeuvre. It was about a close group of people who were ruminating on the threads that connected them. The pandemic was a blank canvas upon which Patchett painted her latest novel, with the love story of Peter and Lara being the catalyst for the Nelsons to ruminate on their relationship with each other. Tom Lake is about different forms of love as well as a story about the intricacies of families and motherhood riddled with details of our contemporary concerns. It is also about fame, ambition, and the complex interplay between choices and destiny. In its direction and execution, Tom Lake is the quintessential pandemic novel: poignant and reflective. Tom Lake was laidback but it was brimming with the small moments that redefined our lives during the pandemic.

Book Specs

Author: Ann Patchett
Publisher: Harper
Publishing Date: 2023
Number of Pages: 309
Genre: Literary

Synopsis

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family’s orchard in northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughter examine their own lives and their relationship with their mother, and are forced to reframe their understanding of the world they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives our parents led before they were our parents. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional acuity, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most acclaimed literary talents at work today.

About the Author

To learn more about Ann Patchett, click here.