‘Tom Lake’ Finds Ann Patchett in a Chekhovian Mood

An image of five brown, crooked-branched trees with salmon-colored leaves, against a mostly green background; the negative space between the trees suggests silhouette portraits of four women. Are you in possession of a hammock? A creaky old porch swing? A bay window with built-in seating? If not, Ann Patchett’s new novel, “Tom Lake,” will situate you there mentally. I wouldn’t be surprised if it put your fitness tracker on the fritz, even if you amble around listening to Meryl Streep read the audio version. This author is such a decorated and beloved figure in American letters — spinning out novels , memoirs and essays like so many multicolored silks; opening an independent bookstore in Nashville to fight the Amazon anaconda; even helping care for Tom Hanks’s cancer-stricken personal assistant — that I sometimes think of her as Aunt Patchett. Patchett’s actual family of origin was complicated, as she made explicit after the 2016 publication of the semi-autobiographical “ Commonwealth .” “ The Dutch House ” (2019), which had a wicked stepmother, did not stray far from the idea that living with relatives can be messy and hellish. With “Tom Lake,” she treats us — and perhaps herself — to a vision of a family beautifully, bucolically simple: nuclear, in its pre-bomb meaning. Like some guardian angel in the sky, Anton Chekhov hovers over this story, which features three sisters in their 20s and is set on their parents’ cherry orchard (albeit in northern Michigan during the recent pandemic, not the tuberculosis- torn Russian provinces). But Thornton Wilder is driving the tractor. Sequestered not unhappily in lockdown, the sisters’ mother, Lara (she dropped a “u” after reading “Doctor Zhivago”), is telling them, after tiring days in the field, about her long-ago, short-lived career as an actress, whose highlight was starring as Emily Gibbs , the tragic heroine of Wilder’s enduringly popular piece of Americana, “Our Town.” In flashbacks we learn she played Emily in both high school and college in New Hampshire, also home to the play’s fictional Grover’s Corners. Then, after a brief and disorienting detour to Hollywood, she […]

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