Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett.
Tom Lake is not a person, but a place – a place that
was known as Tom’s Lake, until people’s love of abbreviation shortened it. It was a small community on the northern
shores of Lake Michigan, renowned for its summer stock performances, perfect
venues for up-and-coming young actors to make their mark and go on to greater
things – or fade out under the relentless competition.
It’s also a place of memories, both wonderful and awful,
as Lara Wilson works with her daughters picking cherries on their fruit farm
forty years later; they are all back
home for the summer – and the pandemic:
the farm is horrendously short-staffed as all their usual pickers are in
lockdown, and Lara’s beloved girls have all returned to spend lockdown with
their parents, and are now demanding a story of Lara’s past, that summer she
spent at Tom Lake starring – yes, STARRING! – in Our Town by Thornton Wilder
opposite Peter Duke, now a world-famous movie and TV actor. The fact that she
used to date him has been a never-ending source of delight to the girls, always
up for a good story since childhood:
cherry-picking is hard, monotonous work and they need a diversion.
And this story is indeed diverting. Lara is a truthful woman and has censored
very little in her retelling of her romance with Peter Duke, the Unknown Actor,
for whom she fell so wildly in love at the age of twenty-four, ‘that it felt
like falling off the roof at midnight.’ But
she didn’t share everything with her
curious girls, especially his desire to experience fully every sensation and
emotion on offer, and his penchant for self-destruction – or the particularly
cruel and casual end to their sizzling affair, or how the events at Tom Lake
eventually put an end to her own nascent acting career.
Ms Patchett has created an ode to love in all its forms
noble and otherwise, with characters to match:
it was absurdly easy for this reader to fall under Peter Duke’s spell,
and her lesser characters are little works of art. A vein of humour flows through the drama like
a welcome drink, and it was very hard to say goodbye to Lara and her lovely
daughters – and Tom Lake. SIX STARS.
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