Tom Lake

By Ann Patchett

Harper     2023

320 pages     Literary

And the next book on my tour of the Great Lakes takes us back to Lake Michigan. Tom Lake by
Ann Patchett is based in a cherry farm near Traverse City, Michigan. I read the book during Michigan cherry season, and loved the book as much as I loved this season’s cherries.

The book begins when young Lara is registering people who are auditioning for roles in a local production of the classic play, Our Town. She becomes so disgusted with the quality of the actors, that she decides to audition for the part of Emily herself.

Because of her classic portrayal of Emily, a few years later, she is called by the area’s summer stock theater, Tom Lake, to take over the role of Emily when the actress playing the role leaves. There she meets and has a brief affair with Peter Duke, a young actor who went on to become a famous movie and television actor.

Fast forward more than 20 years to 2020. Lara farms a cherry orchard near Traverse City with her husband Joe. Joe inherited the farm and orchard from his aunt and uncle after he and Lara met at the Tom Lake Theater. It is the pandemic summer, and Lara and Joe’s three daughters have returned home. All five of them are picking cherries, because it is too difficult to find workers due to the pandemic.

Over the course of the summer, the girls ask their mother to tell them the story of her summer at Tom Lake, and she, very poignantly, recalls that magical summer in her life. By listening to her stories, the daughters come into a realization of who they are and what they want their lives to be.

The Washington Post reviewer says, “Tom Lake is about romantic love, marital love, and maternal love, but also the love of animals, the love of stories, love of the land and trees and the tiny, red, cordiform object that is a cherry.”

Tom Lake fit my summer perfectly. I had been having cherry spitting contests on the Lake Michigan beachfront with my grandchildren, and telling lots of stories of my childhood. Then a group of family went to see The Wizard of Oz at our local summer stock theater, The Augusta Barn Theater, and I was able to transfer what I saw that night to what Tom Lake theater must have been like. And while I was absorbing Patchett’s writing, I was visiting with my siblings, and we were telling stories of our childhood.

That is the beauty of Patchett’s writing. She elicits great respect for her characters, particularly Lara. She understands her life well—the adventures of the theater and the affair with a soon to be famous actor, the choice to marry a cherry farmer, and the pandemic that brought her family all together. Patchett loves her characters and hence we love them as well.

The New Yorker had a wonderful review of Tom Lake in their August 7 edition, and the Shelf Awareness website named it one of the best books for the week of August 18. The reviewer neatly summed up the book. “In many ways, Patchett’s stunning novel is a story of opportunity missed or not taken; her daughter’s unspoken questions hang between them. ‘Are you sorry? Don’t you wish?’ Tom Lake, though, is not a novel of regret but rather one of clarity, offering a tale of gratitude borne of perspective and experience, a life lived in the present—even as it is shaped by the past.”