Recent Reviews
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
I have read every book written by Ann Patchett. Her impressive works delve into her character’s inner lives and offer insight into family and group dynamics. Of her eight works of fiction, her most recent Commonwealth and The Dutch House are my favorites. I hoped her newest novel, Tom Lake, would deepen this exploration of family dynamics. But Tom Lake seemed to float more than dig.
Tom Lake is about family stories and secrets. Three twenty-something sisters return to their family’s Michigan cherry orchard during COVID to help their parents harvest the cherries. To make the long and laborious days of picking cherries pass more quickly, the young women goad their mother Lara to tell them about her life before they were born. Specifically, they want to learn more about her short acting career and relationship with Peter Duke, now a famous movie star.
Over several days, Lara tells her tale with occasional contributions from her husband, Joe. Lara explains to their daughters how she became an actress in high school when she landed the role of Emily Webb in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. Lara returned to the role of Emily in summer stock theater in Tom Lake, Michigan. There, she had met Peter Duke, who played her husband-to-be, George Gibbs. Lara’s daughters, Emily, Maisie and Nell, knew that their mother professionally acted in her early twenties. They had seen her in her sole Hollywood movie. But her relationship with Peter Duke was foremost on their minds.
Lara’s narration is dreamy and wistful as she travels back in time. She is calm as she describes her younger self’s thoughts, feelings and interpretations. As she talks, she develops new insights about the story she had told herself and the story that emerges in the telling. Playing Emily in Our Town profoundly affected her life. At the end of Act 3, Emily dies and is allowed to leave the graveyard and visit the living one last time. Emily now sees both the monotony and magic of living. In Emily’s case, it is too late to appreciate life’s gifts. But embodying Emily night after night, Lara had internalized Thornton Wilder’s message. Four decades later, Lara thinks, “Ask that girl who left Tom Lake what she wanted out of life, and she would never in a million years have said the Nelson farm in Traverse City, Michigan, but as it turned out, it was all she wanted.”
As Lara shares her story of summer theater with her daughters, she decides what parts she will disclose and what details she will withhold. Readers are privy to the events not said out loud. Patchett creatively captures the innocent days of youth when choices are made on impulse, not reason.
Though Lara is a complex character, her daughters and husband pale by comparison. References to Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Wilder’s Our Town enrich the story. However, the primary strength of Tom Lake is that Lara learns more about her younger self’s choices than she had understood in previous contemplations, provoking readers to ponder their own life decisions. Even though I had hoped for more, Patchett’s lush and lyrical writing made Tom Lake a pleasure and even a comfort to read.
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner on October 13, 2019
https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/dutch-house-a-powerful-drama-about-family-and-memory/
Ann Patchett’s remarkable new novel ‘The Dutch House’ dives deep into family dynamics, the amorphous nature of memory and the power of the past to shape the present. Patchett continues the theme of her superb book, ‘Commonwealth’: adult children sorting through the detritus of parents’ troubled lives. Patchett’s graceful prose is rich with references to fairy tales and parables. The result is a novel dense with human drama and layers of meaning.
After WWII, Cyril Conroy is a poor man. Due to one successful investment, he becomes wealthy and purchases an iconic house in a suburb of Philadelphia. “Be careful what you wish for” could be the novel’s subtitle; this acquisition is the beginning of the end of Cyril’s happy family and sizable fortune. The mansion, once owned by a Dutch family, is ornate, opulent and architecturally significant. Cyril is confident his new bride, Elna, will fall in love with its lavish beauty. He couldn’t have been more mistaken. Elna, who had considered becoming a nun, hates the ostentatious house. One day, she permanently leaves the Dutch House and her family, choosing instead to help the poor.
This abandonment creates trauma for her three-year-old son, Danny and most especially for her ten-year-old daughter, Maeve. Eventually, their father remarries. His new wife, Andrea, and her two daughters move into the Dutch house, dislodging Danny from his childhood and displacing Maeve from her bedroom. When Cyril Conroy dies unexpectedly four years later, the stepmother, Andrea, cruelly throws Maeve and Danny out of the Dutch house that she now owns. Maeve becomes Danny’s guardian and protector.
Narrated from Danny’s point of view, the novel follows Maeve and Danny as they attempt to make sense of the events that led to their eviction. Though they obtain college degrees, secure jobs, and in Danny’s case, marry and have kids, Maeve and Danny are bonded to one another and trapped in the past. For decades they keep returning to the Dutch House as if a magnetic force is pulling them toward it. While parked across the street, they sit in Maeve’s car and gaze at their old home. With anger, sadness and humor, they examine their past. Maeve shares memories of their mother with Danny. Together, they analyze their enigmatic father and resent their mean stepmother. Danny’s wife says, “It’s like you’re Hansel and Gretel. You just keep walking through the dark woods holding hands no matter how old you get. Do you ever get tired of reminiscing?”
Their mother’s painful abandonment, their father’s careless choices and their stepmother’s petty vindictiveness alter the trajectories of their lives. As the single remnant of their childhoods, the Dutch House becomes a kind of museum of their memories. Then one morning, when Maeve is forty-nine and Danny forty-two, an unexpected event occurs and they decide to stop parking across the street. Twenty-seven years have passed since their expulsion. They realize, “We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it.”
Yet the story is far from over. The Dutch House’s grip on their lives lessens but does not vanish. They must once again broaden their perspective of their past and open themselves to an unforeseen present.
Ann Patchett is like an archeologist excavating an emotional ruin. Her two main characters ask questions, analyze facts and arrive at hypotheses that morph with time and greater understanding. Danny and Maeve acknowledge that their memories might be unreliable and shaped to align with the narrative they created. But isn’t that the nature of recollection?
The surprise ending is moving without being maudlin. Acceptance, forgiveness and healing occur in unexpected ways. Ann Patchett’s talents as a writer are evident on every page. As one character says, “Sometimes you’ve got to put the past in the past.” With empathy, Ann Patchett shows us why that is easier said than done.
Commonwealth by Ann Patchett
Some divorces feel like a tsunami. The resulting tidal wave hits the whole coastline, but some communities get hit harder than others. Ann Patchett’s impressive new novel, Commonwealth, explores the effects of divorce on two families. Spanning decades, this novel is like a longitudinal study of the psychological effects of divorce on the six children whose lives were altered by the dismantling of their families.
Set in Los Angeles, the novel opens when thirty-year-old Bert Cousins kisses Beverly Keating at a christening party. A drunken mistake? End of story? No, because within a couple of years Beverly divorces her husband Fix, marries Bert, and moves across the country with her two little girls to live near Bert’s family in Virginia. Fix Keating is left alone in Los Angles. Bert Cousins leaves his wife Theresa and their four small children in Los Angeles. Though I wished that Patchett had explored Bert and Beverly's decisions to abandon their two young families, it seems that Patchett is more focused on the fallout for the kids.
Every summer, the Keating kids visit their dad in L.A. and the Cousins kids visit their dad in Virginia. And there are several weeks when all six kids become a version of the “Brady Bunch” sharing two bedrooms and a bathroom at Bert and Beverly’s house in Virginia. Beverly’s daughters welcome the visit of the four Cousin children. Patchett writes “Here was the most remarkable thing about the Keating children and the Cousins children: They did not hate one another, nor did they possess one shred of tribal loyalty. The six children held in common one overarching principle that cast their potential dislike for one another down to the bottom of the minor leagues: they disliked the parents. They hated them.”
And for good reason: these adults create havoc in their children’s’ lives. Bert and Beverly are self-involved and not present even during these summer visits. Taking care of six young kids is exhausting and so Bert and Beverly abdicate their responsibilities and the older kids fill the void. On a family road trip, Bert and Beverly leave a note under the kids’ motel room door; “Have breakfast in the coffee shop. You can charge it. We’re sleeping late.” The narrator offers, “One more document in the ever-growing mountain of evidence that they were on their own.” When the kids sneak down to the lake with a bottle of gin and a gun they find in Bert Cousins’ car, it becomes clear just how ignored they are.
During one of the summers, Cal, the oldest son of Bert and Theresa, dies. No clear picture emerges of the minute-by-minute specifics of what occurred that day. Caroline, now the oldest, instructs the other kids on what to say to the parents. The adults think that Cal died alone. But the other five kids were there and bear some responsibility for his death. In their guilt and youth, the stepkids adhere to the agreed-upon story. Even thirty years later, it is unclear it the parents know what transpired that summer afternoon.
Patchett keeps the emotion on an even keel in describing Cal’s death – almost too even. There must have been crying and chaos, grief and guilt. Moving deftly in time between the stepkids and parents, Patchett allows the characters to share their perceptions of what happened that summer day. Their adult recollections have been shaped and altered by the passing of time. The surviving five kids are haunted by guilt about Cal’s death. They struggle with relationships, employment, and addiction. The most capable of the clan ends up in a meditation center in Switzerland, breathing in and out the troubling memories of her childhood. In adulthood, each of the Keating/Cousins children flees to their own psychic corner. None of the grown kids live in the same town as each other or any of the four parents. Yet they are still a collection of citizens belonging to the commonwealth of their blended family.
One of the stepkids, Franny Keating, shares the story of her childhood with her boyfriend who is an author. The resulting book is a catalyst for the blended family to move their PTSD to the forefront. Patchett’s engaging writing lets the reader witness the complicated dynamics of the blended and extended family members. Only a writer with Patchett’s skill could capture the feelings and development of so many characters over such a long period of time.
For the Keating/Cousins kids, the complicated trajectory of their future lives was set in motion the day Bert Cousins kissed Beverly Keating. I won’t spoil the ending, but Patchett finds some redemption in the connection of the children to each other amidst the detritus of the parents’ poor decisions.
