Jessica Woodbury's Reviews > Tom Lake

It is a relief to pick up an Ann Patchett novel, even one that is Just Fine, like this one. I don't know how her books are so utterly absorbing, but they are. There is not a lot to this book, though that doesn't mean it's short on pleasure. A woman recounts an old love affair to her adult daughters as they pick cherries on their family farm. It isn't as leisurely as it sounds, it is the summer of 2020, most of the usual workers aren't there, but the cherries still must be picked and life must go on.

Most of the substance of the book is the story Lara tells us, which is as much a story about her time as an actress as it is about this love affair. Lara has the kind of unlikely fairy tale of a story that doesn't really happen anymore, much to the chagrin of her daughter who actually wants to be an actress, and she stumbles into almost everything that happens to her. Somehow she has never really told her daughters the whole story, and now as her daughters are around the age she was it and they have nothing but time it finally seems like the right time to tell it.

This is technically a pandemic novel and yet it hardly is one. This ties into my major complaint with the book, in that it feels strangely sanitized. In the current events part of the plot, everyone is good. Lara loves her husband Joe, who never does anything that is not perfect and kind. She has a good relationship with her three daughters, who may have their own complicated feelings about being at home and pausing their own lives, but Lara is delighted, so glad they are there that she almost entirely overlooks those difficulties. It is not that people like Lara aren't realistic, at one point she is baffled that her daughters question the point of having children because of climate change and yup there are a lot of people like Lara who find this baffling. But Lara's happiness is rather dull. She does not seem all that concerned about the global pandemic or all the people dying. She is that mom who is just happy her kids are home. It's strange to read that presented as the narrative point of view without any interrogation.

It is an easy book to read, a light one, too. Bad things happen, but the worst of it is already over. And really, the book seems to say, if you just stay with your family on a cherry farm everything will just be fine forever. Sometimes that is the book you want, and that is what Patchett has given us. It's a bit strange, since her family dynamics have usually been so complex, but perhaps she just wanted a nice, small something.