One of my favorite sentences in Tom Lake is its very first:
That Veronica and I were given keys and told to come early on a frozen Saturday in April to open the school for the Our Town auditions was proof of our dull reliability.
This technique is called that-clause fronting, and it’s a beautiful way to organize a sentence that would otherwise belong in a middle schooler’s essay:
Veronica and I were given keys to open the school on Saturday, proving we are dully reliable.
I’ve liked this technique ever since I first read it in high school, coincidentally in Ann Patchett’s earlier novel Bel Canto. I had never read a sentence like that before, and it took me more tries than I would comfortably admit to actually understand it. I think back to my high school self who probably would have asked “Who is ‘That Veronica’? Or is it a term of affection, like ‘Oh, that Veronica’?” But today I recognized it instantly, pleased with myself and excited to read this novel having been reminded how much I love Patchett’s writing.
In stark contrast to Bel Canto with its billionaires and terrorists and opera singers, the stakes in Tom Lake could not be lower. Where the only antagonists are COVID boredom and an impossible number of cherry trees to pick on their farm in Northern Michigan, Lara indulges her three twenty-something daughters with the story of her brief romance with now-famous actor Peter Duke. Delicately weaving between a summer stock production of Our Town in 1988 and a quiet family drama in the summer of 2020, Patchett contemplates love in its many forms and its distillation through time. So often will one of the timelines in a dual timeline story be the obvious dud, seemingly just there to protect the other pages from any spills, but this is far from the case in Tom Lake. Both the past and present are allotted exactly the space they need to breathe life into the characters, their relationships, and the places they inhabit (I will go on believing that Michigan is Eden until I am shown proof to the contrary).
In a way, Tom Lake is a book about telepathy. There are the characters that can read and be read by Lara: her high school friend Veronica, her youngest daughter Nell who wants to be an actor like she once was, her middle daughter Maisie who wants to be a vet, her husband Joe who always has just a few things to finish up on the farm, and Duke’s older brother Sebastian about whom I’ll say nothing more. Then there are the characters whose inner workings remain opaque to Lara: her eldest and most difficult daughter Emily who will take over the farm one day, and Peter Duke, the lovable enigma that has somehow imbued our main family’s lore despite only sharing a stage and a bed with Lara for a few months. Each of these characters reflect or complement or contradict Lara in some way, and Patchett is a master at unveiling these dynamics with grace and precision.
I am younger than Lara was when she first arrived at Tom Lake, younger than even her youngest daughter when the book takes place. Perhaps if my mother, being a few years Lara’s senior, read Tom Lake, she would see herself in the nostalgia of telling your children about your life that happened a lifetime ago. But if I try to look back at my own life with the same sense of scale, I pull a vacuum. My brain is mostly developed, but I don’t have enough to fill it with. My past is so small and recent, and as a result, important.
Maybe it’s foolish to try so hard to see myself in Lara, and the intended lesson for someone my age is laid out far more clearly:
Did I ever wonder if my parents had been in love with other people, or think of them as having lives before their lives included me?
This gets to an important if underdeveloped theme in Tom Lake, which is just how much the world has changed. Lara is not a timeless character. She floated through much of her early adulthood without a hitch. This is not to say that her life was without trauma because that would be to disregard some of the most impactful scenes of the novel, but Lara’s self-admitted aimlessness benefited and rewarded her in a way that is foreign to a young person today. She only briefly recognizes how Nell’s dream of being an actor, one which is difficult even without a global pandemic, was dropped into her lap without her even asking, and she just as easily gave it up. Emily grapples with the uncertain future of the farm that has been the lifeblood of her family for generations, but to Lara, the farm and its pulchritude are permanent fixtures. This casts a shadow on moments like when Lara says that the present, the beginning of COVID, the worst time of many young people’s lives, is the happiest of hers.
But even with this generational divide, seeing how Lara is so comfortable with the past and so enraptured by the present, I can’t help but try to glean a lesson on memory. Roughly a third of my life has happened since I read Bel Canto, but still, reminiscing on that time in my life, beyond my extra credit reading, can stab me in my side like a knife. The people I miss, the time I wasted, the sadness I could have avoided—Oh! If only I had known what I know now. If only I could know what I’ll know later. Lara taught me to aspire to something more productive than hindsight and prescience. I want to remember this moment softly, with contentedness and acceptance and distance, claiming from and ultimately dulling that once sharp blade. But that is far too long of a title, and I am no Charlie Kaufman, so plainly will do.
There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well.