By Ann Patchett
A mother recalls a summer romance
Subject
Themes
On a frozen Saturday morning in New Hampshire, a seventeen-year-old girl named Laura Kenison sits at a registration table in her high school gym and watches adults audition for a community theatre production of Our Town. She has been roped in through her grandmother, who does the costumes. By afternoon she has learned more about acting from the auditioners' failures than any class could teach her, and she has signed herself up to try for the part of Emily Webb. She changes the spelling of her first name on the registration form to Lara, discarding the u as a small act of reinvention.
On a frozen Saturday morning in New Hampshire, a seventeen-year-old girl named Laura Kenison sits at a registration table in her high school gym and watches adults audition for a community theatre production of Our Town. She has been roped in through her grandmother, who does the costumes. By…
*Tom Lake* was published in August 2023, and from the start it attracted attention for what it was not doing as much as for what it was. In an era of novels that tend towards structural fragmentation, experimental narration, or maximalist ambition, Ann Patchett delivered a novel that is quiet,…
Laura does not tell her daughters a story about the past; she tells them the story she has made of the past, and the novel is honest about the difference. The two timelines that run through *Tom Lake*, the summer at the summer-stock theatre in 1988 and the pandemic summer on the cherry farm in 2020,…
One of the central arguments of *Tom Lake* is that talent and desire are not the same thing, and that a life shaped by talent does not necessarily look like the life that talent points towards. Laura is an exceptionally good Emily Webb; she is an exceptionally poor Mae in *Fool for Love*. The range…
The Nelson cherry farm in northern Michigan is not simply a setting in *Tom Lake*; it is a character, one that exerts a pressure on the people who come into contact with it that the novel calls, through Joe, invisible leashes. The leashes are not restraints; they are more like gravity, something…
Storytelling in *Tom Lake* is not transparent but strategic. Laura is fifty-seven, narrating a summer from thirty-five years ago, and she knows the difference between what happened and what she is willing to say. The daughters want everything. Laura gives them what she judges they can use. The…
*Tom Lake* contains two kinds of love story and refuses to rank them. There is the love that burns hot and brief and leaves a mark that does not fully fade, and there is the love that accumulates over decades into something as familiar and necessary as the farm itself. The novel presents both with…
Lara Nelson, born Laura Kenison, is the narrator of *Tom Lake*, and the novel's entire architecture is shaped by her voice: measured, warm, self-deprecating, and quietly precise. At the time of the story's telling, she is fifty-seven, a cherry farmer in northern Michigan, the wife of Joe Nelson and…
Joe Nelson is introduced to the novel's past as a young man on a farm in Traverse City who happens to be a theatre director; he is introduced to the novel's present as a farmer in northern Michigan who happened once to direct plays. The reversal is the whole of his character. He is the person who…
Peter Duke exists in *Tom Lake* in two forms that never quite coincide: the young man at the summer-stock theatre in 1988, and the famous actor who takes up residence in the Nelson family's imagination for decades afterwards. Lara knows both of them, and she is careful not to let one explain the…
Pallace Clarke is Laura's understudy at Tom Lake for both *Our Town* and *Fool for Love*, and she is also, for the summer, Laura's closest friend and ultimately the person who takes everything she had: the parts, the boyfriend, and the year. She arrives in the novel as legs, which Nell immediately…
Sebastian Duke is called Saint Sebastian by almost everyone who knows him, and the name is not entirely ironic. He is the still point at the centre of a story full of people in motion: actors lurching towards ambition or towards one another, a director playing a long game, a young woman figuring out…
Emily Nelson is Laura and Joe's eldest daughter, twenty-six during the pandemic summer on the farm. She is strapping and capable, all her father's height and all her mother's dark hair, and she has been the hardest member of the family for the longest time. As a teenager she was, by Laura's account,…
Maisie Nelson is the middle daughter, twenty-four during the pandemic summer, and she is in her third year of veterinary training at Michigan State, completing her coursework remotely while finding no shortage of practical experience in northern Michigan. She delivers a foal by herself at two in the…
Nell Nelson is the youngest daughter, twenty-two, and she wants to be an actress. She has been pricing tickets to New York since seventh grade, and the pandemic has brought her home to pick cherries in the summer heat while her acting training sits suspended and her friends practise monologues over…
On a frozen Saturday morning in New Hampshire, seventeen-year-old Laura Kenison arrives at her high school gym to help register auditioners for a community theatre production of *Our Town*. She is there through family connection, her best friend Veronica alongside her. The turnout is enormous:…
Three years pass and *Singularity* is still unfinished. Laura calls Ripley for advice and he tells her not to take acting classes; her natural transparency is the thing, and classes will ruin it. He mentions in passing that a Broadway production of *Our Town* is taking shape with Spalding Gray as…
Rehearsals at Tom Lake settle into their compressed rhythm. Uncle Wallace is unreliable in his hours but unimpeachable on stage; the director Nelson draws unexpectedly deep performances from everyone in the company. Duke and Laura's relationship is obvious to all, and Nelson asks them gently to make…
Opening night of *Our Town* arrives. Backstage in the dark, Uncle Wallace reaches down and takes Laura's hand. They stand together without speaking until it is time for him to walk out onto the stage. The performance runs well, but later in the season something goes wrong. During the third act,…
In Uncle Wallace's cottage, Laura elevates her foot and mends costumes. The wardrobe mistress Cat brings a laundry basket of damaged pieces each morning and stays to talk, offering quiet stories about Albert Long from earlier years. Laura's confidence as an actress has broken entirely. She knows she…
Six weeks after Duke drowns in the Tyrrhenian Sea, a tall grey-haired man arrives on the farm porch and sits on the swing. Maisie finds him there and recognises him at once. Sebastian Duke. The whole family comes in from the barn. Over lunch Sebastian tells the daughters what he has come to say:…
Lara Nelson, born Laura Kenison, is the narrator of *Tom Lake*, and the novel's entire architecture is shaped by her voice: measured, warm, self-deprecating, and quietly precise. At the time of the story's telling, she is fifty-seven, a cherry farmer in northern Michigan, the wife of Joe Nelson and…
Joe Nelson is introduced to the novel's past as a young man on a farm in Traverse City who happens to be a theatre director; he is introduced to the novel's present as a farmer in northern Michigan who happened once to direct plays. The reversal is the whole of his character. He is the person who…
Peter Duke exists in *Tom Lake* in two forms that never quite coincide: the young man at the summer-stock theatre in 1988, and the famous actor who takes up residence in the Nelson family's imagination for decades afterwards. Lara knows both of them, and she is careful not to let one explain the…
Pallace Clarke is Laura's understudy at Tom Lake for both *Our Town* and *Fool for Love*, and she is also, for the summer, Laura's closest friend and ultimately the person who takes everything she had: the parts, the boyfriend, and the year. She arrives in the novel as legs, which Nell immediately…
Sebastian Duke is called Saint Sebastian by almost everyone who knows him, and the name is not entirely ironic. He is the still point at the centre of a story full of people in motion: actors lurching towards ambition or towards one another, a director playing a long game, a young woman figuring out…
Emily Nelson is Laura and Joe's eldest daughter, twenty-six during the pandemic summer on the farm. She is strapping and capable, all her father's height and all her mother's dark hair, and she has been the hardest member of the family for the longest time. As a teenager she was, by Laura's account,…
Maisie Nelson is the middle daughter, twenty-four during the pandemic summer, and she is in her third year of veterinary training at Michigan State, completing her coursework remotely while finding no shortage of practical experience in northern Michigan. She delivers a foal by herself at two in the…
Nell Nelson is the youngest daughter, twenty-two, and she wants to be an actress. She has been pricing tickets to New York since seventh grade, and the pandemic has brought her home to pick cherries in the summer heat while her acting training sits suspended and her friends practise monologues over…
On a frozen Saturday morning in New Hampshire, a seventeen-year-old girl named Laura Kenison sits at a registration table in her high school gym and watches adults audition for a community theatre production of Our Town. She has been roped in through her grandmother, who does the costumes. By afternoon she has learned more about acting from the auditioners' failures than any class could teach her, and she has signed herself up to try for the part of Emily Webb. She changes the spelling of her first name on the registration form to Lara, discarding the u as a small act of reinvention.