Reading Time: 1 Min.
PETER HOWITT’S 1998 romantic dramedy Sliding Doors stars Gwyneth Paltrow as a not-particularly-convincing young English gal whose entire life hinges on whether she catches or misses a train. In the life where Helen Quilley makes that train, she catches her boyfriend in flagrante delicto. She moves out, cuts her hair, starts her own PR firm. If the train is missed, her life at first seems to bumble along, though that bumbling is both quiet and dramatic. Of course, Paltrow’s Helen is unaware that the actual sliding doors are so significant. Few of us have such instantaneous clarity. In Ann Patchett’s latest novel, Tom Lake , a teenager named—for the time being—Laura Kenison finds herself spending an April Saturday in a high school gym manning auditions for a local production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town . Laura is seven weeks from the end of her junior year, but this day, in this gym, watching her neighbors try out to be the Stage Manager, Mrs. Webb, George Gibbs, Emily Webb, and all the other members of Grover’s Corners, this is her decisive moment. “None of the books I’d read were as important as this, none of the math tests or history papers had taught me how to act,” she thinks, “and by ‘act’ I don’t mean on a stage, I mean in life. What I was seeing was nothing less than how to present myself in the world.” In between Georges and Emilys, Laura reaches for a registration form not because she has dreams of becoming an actress but because, she thinks, “I knew that I could do a better job.” The sheet asks for her name and stage name, which she fills out with all the pertinent information, then folds it up and starts again. This time, she is Lara, which she chooses partly because she is reading Doctor Zhivago . It isn’t that Lara knows how to act, but she knows how not to act—so she says the lines as she had heard them in her head all day, and by the end, she is Emily. But Lara in […]
Click here to view original page at Fission and Fusion: On Ann Patchett’s “Tom Lake”
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Reading Time: 1 Min. Cover illustration for “The Frindle Files.”Credit…Brian Selznick There’s a moment in early childhood when pure, wide-eyed
Reading Time: 1 Min. Fantasy and science fiction readers are naturally open to the unexpected, and they like new takes
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