Patchett, Ann. Tom Lake. HarperCollins New York, 2023. F;10/23.

I read this novel with great pleasure. Some people might find its pleasure a bit superficial because it’s very girly and very American. But the serious grit is snuck in through a back door. Anyway none of that bothered me. It’s rich with coming-of-age, romantic thrills, drama (both of the story and through focus on dramatic entertainment) and each character is complicated: good and bad, weak and strong, simple and devious. Patchett is confident enough to enjoy spinning a sweet story that’s also not so sweet. Well done!

Lara, married at 50 and living on a cherry farm, welcomes her twentyish daughters home from the pandemic to shelter and work at cherry-picking. While they work the girls extract from mum her story of starring as Emily in the high school play Our Town by Wilder, and then ask serious questions about her summer-stock fling with now-famous movie star Peter Duke. The fling took place decades ago at the titular Lake, after Lara impressed a scout and played an Emily-like character in a successful Hollywood movie.

I popped a kumquat in my mouth the way bored girls in L.A. will do. The sourness was akin to being electrocuted but I betrayed nothing. Maybe I was a better actress than I thought.

The extended flashback to the Lake is full-on sexy and alive with Duke’s honest tennis pro brother, gorgeous black actress friend Pallette, the Our Town director, a drunk actor who nearly dies on stage, a car trip to the same cherry farm with connections to the present, and Lara’s injury, allowing understudy Pallette to play Emily and while doing so impress Lara (and attract Duke):

The remaining few who’d managed to hold on to their belief that Emily could not be Black were destroyed by the third act. We all were. When she went back to her mother’s kitchen I cried like I had never seen the play before. I cried because she was that good. I cried because I would never play Emily again. I cried because I had loved that world so much.

Back to the present we learn about the three daughters’ lives: Emily is a veterinary student, Maisie will soon marry the heir of a neighbouring farm, and Nell wants to be an actress. But after hesitation Lara’s story continues with a much later visit to the farm by Duke, and she visiting him and having sex in an dreadful elite rehabilitation facility.

Patchett’s Lara is troubled by the effect of her story on her daughters, funny and harsh in recounting it, maturely in love with husband Joe (the Our Town director: “ “We weren’t particularly interesting,” I say. Good marriages are never as interesting as bad affairs.”), and unconsciously metaphoric (“All of which is to say you don’t see a play when you’re in it. You might see pieces, but you don’t know how it looks from a distance, the whole thing put together.”).

Sex, deceit, performance, personal limitation, crushing disappointment, savouring tradition and the farm, and that gripping twisted love story-within-a-story in the past that pulls a family together. There is a succulent fruit-like roundness to this and I happily gobbled it up.

Don’t worry, you can trust me, I’m a doctor and also a gourmand. A whole dinner of sweet dessert once in awhile won’t hurt you. But it tastes better if there’s a little sharp sourness mixed in.

9.1/9.4