By Scott Graber
It is Saturday, and I’m in Port Royal. It is brisk this morning, but I have a long-sleeved wool shirt and my Starbucks — House Blend. I also have Ann Patchett’s latest novel, “Tom Lake.”
Ann Patchett has long been a favorite author. One remembers “Bel Canto” and “State of Wonder”. But my memory always goes back to her interview of Pat Conroy at the Nashville Public Library in 2013 — an interview that can be viewed on YouTube.
“Tom Lake” is the story of a woman, a former actor, who had a romance with a man who thereafter became a movie star. The woman, now married to someone else, lives in Michigan where she and her family raise cherries. It’s harvest time and they are short on hired help meaning that this family must harvest these cherries on their own. Let us just say this fact gives this novel an overarching sense of desperation.
“Tom Lake” centers itself on a play, “Our Town”, that the narrator (Lara Kenison) first encounters when she is in high school. Lara instinctively understands the “Emily” character as she watches other teenagers audition for the part. Lara abruptly decides abandon to her registration job and read for the part herself.
She gets the role.
On the strength of the Lara’s high school success, she lurches into an acting career — eventually going to Hollywood and making a movie. That movie, for reasons only known by industry insiders, is not immediately released. While she waits for its release, and for the fame everyone says will surely come, she does summer stock in a mythical place in Michigan called Tom Lake.
The play they do in Michigan is “Our Town.”
While at Tom Lake she falls for a man, Peter Duke, who plays the part of the small town editor in “Our Town.” They swim, smoke cigarettes and have a lot of casual sex. Ms. Patchett spends a good deal of time on facial description, especially the black eyelashes of Peter Duke, and the image of Keanu Reeves came into my head, and I could never erase that image though I tried.
Although the romance in Tom Lake is central to the story, the details of that long-ago romance come out slowly as Lara reveals that summer of love and loss to her daughters while they methodically and desperately remove the ripe cherries from the endless groves that seemingly stretch into Canada.
It is not clear why, at this moment, she is telling her three mesmerized daughters about this love affair. But her telling is often interrupted by these twenty-something daughters who are curious about their mother’s other life — glamorous, exciting and now nothing but a lengthy, break-time anecdote.
The telling of her s story is paralleled by Lara’s unspoken mental narrative that delves more deeply, and more explicitly, into what happened at Tom Lake. And it’s clear Lara’s is weighing every word, each scene, and being very careful in the telling of her story.
Why?
Some years ago I was at my nephew’s wedding reception having a wine-assisted discussion with my brother. We were talking about our childhood — our relationship with our father. I hoped David would remember minor details I had forgotten.
Not only did he remember details that had evaporated from my own narrative; but in many respects his narrative was completely different. The story that he told had dialogue, movement and characters that did not inhabit my story.
It occurred to me that I may have done more than rewrite small parts of my past. I don’t want to use the word “lie,” but clearly I had re-shaped my stories to make them comprehensible. Apparently I wanted my story to have a beginning, middle and end. I also wanted humor, self-deprecating humor being the best. I wanted structure.
Now, thinking back, I probably buried most of the pain, all of the shame as I tried to re-weave the fabric of my life. And if the truth be told, there was a lot of “non-being” as Virginia Wolf would say. (See New Yorker, July 10-17, 2023, “Tell No Tales”). When one has “cotton wool,” empty space, then there is going to be some serious back-filling.
Ms Patchett tells a story about a woman with a past who has to do some editing. Fortunately we get both the expurgated and the actual versions. In the process Ann Patchett gives us a great ride and some fabulous fiction.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
