Why this book: I’d read and really enjoyed Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto and had read a couple of good reviews of this book. I listened to it on audible.

Summary in 4 Sentences: Told in first person from a mature woman in her late 50s spending time with all three of her grown daughters who had to leave school/work during the pandemic to return home to the cherry farm in Michigan where they’d grown up.    As they all work together on the farm, the daughters are eager to learn about their mother’s (our protagonist) past when she had had an affair with a man who’d become an A-list  famous movie star.  In Tom Lake, she shares with the reader what she shares with her daughters, as well as what she doesn’t share with her daughters, and her perspectives on life looking back on that exciting and romantic period, how she views her daughters and her life now – her marriage to a man who she loves and is solid but not nearly as exciting as her former lover.  It is a meditation on life from a wise woman looking back on her decisions, her life, and her very different relationships with her daughters.

My Impressions: Not my normal fare, and some would call this a “chick” book,  given that the protagonist and most of the key characters are women, and it deals largely with a woman’s life and perspectives – men play a supporting role in the book.  But I not only thoroughly enjoyed Tom Lake,  but also  very much appreciated the perspectives this book gave me on women, their wisdom, priorities and values, coming  from this very admirable main character.   

This is Lara Wilson’s story, about her growing up and becoming a young actress in her 20s playing Emily in a performance of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, in a fictional theater in Michigan known as Tom Lake.  During this period she has a passionate romantic tryst with the male lead in the play. The story goes back-and-forth between her youthful experiences in Tom Lake to the “present” day, when she is a married empty-nester in her late 50s, living with her husband on their farm in Michigan, telling her story to her grown daughters who are eager to hear about their mothers romantic adventures.   The audible is read by Meryl Streep who does a remarkable job, convincingly embodying in her voice the woman she is representing.  

The Our Town story is a constant sub-theme in the book – Patchett writes it almost assuming her readers are familiar with the story.  And Tom Lake has it’s analagous themes to those in Our Town – the joys of family and community, the joys and pains of life and romantic love from the perspective of a young girl. Our Town won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1938. 

Tom Lake is also a coming of age novel, but later in life.  We learn how Lara gains maturity from the joys and trauma of  her romantic experiences as a budding young actress, to then choosing to leave that world behind and opt for a more stable and simpler life, living on and working a cherry farm in upstate Michigan with her husband, raising three girls. 

The setting of the novel is later Lara’s life, during the pandemic when her three daughters return home to spend the COVID shut-down on the cherry farm they grew up on with family, and the whole family is once again together, working the farm – because Covid restrictions don’t allow the normal seasonal laborers to be there.   During their work, the daughters begin inquiring about their mother’s earlier life and they want to know more about an affair she had had with another actor who subsequently became one of the top and most famous male actors in America. Think Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise. .  

In Tom Lake, Lara is her telling us her story, and we read what she tells her daughters, what she’s thinking as she tells her story and she shares with us what she doesn’t or won’t tell her daughters. She shares why she leaves some parts out,  and how each of her daughters reacts very differently to different parts of her story.  We are inside her head, and we come to see how she regards and relates differently to each of the daughters, who are indeed very different. And most importantly, we see how 30+ years of life and maturity change her perspective on what was so urgent to her as a young woman.

And just when I thought I’d figured out the story and it’s trajectory, Patchett throws in some surprises that catch me a bit off guard, even decades after the tumultuous passionate romance between Lara and Duke.

I really enjoyed the characters in the novel – all seemed legitimate and realistic:

• Lara Nelson – She is the best developed of the characters; the entire story is told from her perspective and we see it all through her eyes.  An intelligent woman with a wisdom and maturity that has come through some tough lessons learned in her youth, some of which she relates to her daughters, and what she doesn’t tell them, she tells us. 
• Peter Duke – the extremely charming, gifted, talented, narcissistic and self-serving male heart throb of Lara’s youth.  I couldn’t help but like him – nor could Lara resist, nor could most women – but he was a slave to his charm and talent, and his seeming ability to get whatever he wanted.
• The three daughters: Emily Maisie, Nel who loved and bickered with each other and played off of each other in getting their mother to tell her story. Emily is hard-core and pragmatic, but has some baggage with her mother, and will take over the farm; Maize is on her way to becoming a veterinarian, and Nel wants to be an actress and can’t believer her mother walked away from the opportunities she had in Hollywood. .  
• Sebastian Duke:  Peter’s brother who protected Peter (from himself and his sometimes excessive exuberance, also talented and good looking, but a truly nice guy, selflessly helping others – the counterpoint to Peter’s self-absorption. 
• Joe Nelson: Lara’s husband, who during Lara’s tryst with Peter Duke, had been the director of the play Our Town, and then had the role of stage manager in the play.   Joe was a quiet, solid, mature, admirable, and ultimately stabilizing presence in the novel.  

Some key themes that I saw. 

Love – the fiery passion of youthful, hormone-driven infatuation contrasts with the steady flame of a more “mature”  persistent love, companionship and partnership of long term marriage – to include paternal love for children. This book also touches on the regrets and painful residue of a broken heart – how the wounds of disappointed love can heal over time, as we get older,  but not completely.

All that glitters is not gold – especially in Hollywood.  Lara spent some time in the limelight in Hollywood as a supporting actress in a movie which did pretty well.  She ultimately didn’t like the Hollywood scene, and was able to see through the hype, manipulation and marketing behind much of tinseltown.  We see in Duke and a couple of others in the book,  that the glamour of Hollywood can draw people driven by a yearning need for the power and attention that comes with stardom.  Through Lara we get insights into the pathology behind much of the pursuit of fame and celebrity that drives Hollywood.

The joys and challenges of living on a farm, and the attachment that farmers and their families have to the land that their forefathers cleared and worked. And to small communities where people take care of each other.  Lara’s exciting and romantic past is regularly contrasted with her love of the simple stability and peacefulness of life in a rural community, with close connections to and inter-dependency with people in that small community. 

The simple beauty of nature is juxtaposed against the fast paced urban, impersonal and anonymous life in the cities where Lara has works – LA and New York.  She often returns to the theme of the simple and therapeutic beauty of nature. 

This book won’t appeal to everyone – it is a quiet book without a lot of excitement or drama.  But I thought it was a great story, very well told which shares wisdom and insights from an admirable mature woman.   I recommend it to thoughtful readers who don’t necessarily need a Bourne Identity type of drama in their reading. 

I”d recommend a couple of other reviews of Ann Patchett’s  Tom Lake:  The New Yorker  review.   New York Times review,  The Washington Examiner  review