Tom Lake

Tom Lake is Ann Patchett's 2023 novel, her late-career literary commercial novel and the book that introduced a new audience to Patchett through the Meryl Streep audiobook narration. The setting is the early-COVID 2020 spring on a Michigan cherry farm, where Lara Kenison and her husband Joe have asked their three adult daughters (Emily, Maisie, Nell) home to help pick the crop while the world is locked down. The daughters press their mother to finally tell them the full story of her brief 1980s summer-stock-theatre romance with Peter Duke, a young actor who later became a household-name movie star. Lara's first-person narration runs the daughters' present-tense cherry-farm work in parallel with the summer in 1988 when she played Emily Webb opposite Duke's George Gibbs in Our Town at Tom Lake summer theatre in northern Michigan.

Patchett's structural method is the slow alternation between the 2020 farm-day chapters and the 1988 theatre-summer chapters, with the mother-daughter relationship doing the structural work of explaining why Lara has chosen to never tell this story before. The Our Town subtext (the play within the novel as the moral framework of the novel itself) is the literary engine and earns the gut-punch the back half quietly delivers. The cherry-picking procedural detail is rendered with the kind of patient realist texture that Patchett's career has been built on. The Peter Duke material is handled with the moral seriousness the late-career-fame-and-addiction subject requires.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the right Patchett entry point alongside Bel Canto and The Dutch House, and as one of the canonical pandemic-era American novels. The Meryl Streep audiobook is the definitive audio production and the right format for a first read. Five stars without reservation.