“It was an anxious spring for the world,” Patchett writes obliquely on page 24,not naming “the pandemic” until page 99. This is her Covid novel,in which she cleverly uses lockdown as a dramatic device to bring the family together for a season of revelations. For Lara,“the present – this unparalleled disaster – is the happiest time of my life”. The novel shifts between 2020 and 1984,the year Lara’s acting career took off – “nothing like what Orwell had envisioned and still it was a world nearly impossible to explain”.
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Lara’s daughters act as a chorus to elicit and judge her memories. Each also has an individual purpose:Nell,the actor halted by Covid;Maisie,the lifesaving vet,and Emily,who wants to take over the farm. There are glimmers ofLittle Women andLittle House on the Prairie, and fleeting shadows of The Cherry Orchard andKing Lear (why else have three daughters?),but Patchett doesn’t follow anyone else’s script.
Lovers of her writing will wonder howTom Lake compares with her previous perfect novels about fractured families,Commonwealth andThe Dutch House. The seeds ofTom Lake can be traced to another 2011 essay,This is the Story of a Happy Marriage,but the novel is less obviously autobiographical thanCommonwealth and emotionally warmer thanThe Dutch House. It perfectly completes a loose (and perhaps unintentional) trilogy with a wholesomeness that reminds us about American decency while refusing to be sentimental.
To say any more would spoil this Russian doll of storytelling,this play within a play within a play. Patchett writes with her usual humanity and time switches so fluid you can’t see the joins.Tom Lake is a reassuring portrait of our plague-time,an antidote to dystopian hysteria,the Patchett novel we need now.