Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

It’s 2025 and Covid 2020 seems so close and yet so far away. Listening to Anne Patchett’s 2023 novel, Tom Lake, set during the pandemic, brings me back. The audio book is narrated by Meryl Streep and her voice lulls me into remembering, with some nostalgia, parts of the lockdown. Homecooked dinners. Family time on steroids. And time outdoors where masks were optional. Tom Lake is all that: Protagonist Lara and her husband, Joe’s adult daughters have returned home – tucked safely into the family orchard during the pandemic to help with the cherry harvest, eating lunches of cold sandwiches in the orchard and family dinners at the oak farm table, relaxing with a day at the lake after harvest, and watching outdoor movies projected onto a sheet for families gathered in little pods on their blankets with picnic baskets.

Joe and Lara have three daughters: Emily, slated to one day take over the orchard, Masie, who is in veterinarian school, and Nell, who aspires to become an actress like her mother. They are curious about their mother’s before life, and with an abundance of time and in need of entertainment while harvesting cherries side-by-side, Lara indulges them with the story of her short-lived acting career and romance with Oscar-winning actor Peter Duke.

Cast together in a summer theater production of Our Town at a theater company called Tom Lake, Lara and Peter and the other cast members provide plenty of fodder for Lara’s daughter’s imaginations. It’s summer theater and the cast bonds quickly. They run to the lake for a swim between rehearsals, they hang together in the sultry summer evenings, and love is in the air. The tale gets sweeter when Lara is discovered by Ripley, a Hollywood director who offers her a screen test and a part in his new movie.

It was perfect. Until it wasn’t.

Lara’s daughters are curious about why their mother didn’t continue to pursue her acting career after the movie role and why and how she left Peter Duke behind for their farmer father and the orchard where they were raised. Over the course of the harvest, Lara dishes out the entire story – a story that was once painfully lived, but in retrospect makes perfect sense. The orchard is a leash that pulls you back, she tells them, and certainly there is truth in it, for here they are as well.

I didn’t want Patchett’s Tom Lake to end. The characters were charming and engaging, the setting as sweet as the cherries they harvested, and the story compelling and redemptive. Highly recommended.

This is Lin Salisbury with Superior Reviews.