Tom Lake – Ann Patchett

The group selected Grace’s recommendation for Tom Lake by Ann Patchett and we met at Carolyn’s to discuss it on Friday, October 27, 2023. Members who had read some of Ann Patchett’s other books considered this a minor work. Some of us raised credibility issues with the number of coincidences in the storyline and/or with the behavior of the two main characters. It was a novel that was set during the pandemic with the three daughters returning home to their parents on the cherry farm in Michigan. This close proximity prompted the adult daughters to ask questions about the past and to push their mother for answers.

Notes from Goodreads:

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.

Patchett was born in Los Angeles, California. Her mother is the novelist Jeanne Ray.

Patchett said she loves her home in Nashville with her doctor husband and dog. “Home is …the stable window that opens out into the imagination.” She attended Sarah Lawrence College and took fiction writing classes with Allan Gurganus, Russell Banks, and Grace Paley. She later attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars. She co-founded Parnassus Books with Karen Hayes in Nashville in 2011. In 2012, Patchett was on the Time 100 list of most influential people in the world by TIME magazine. (Ed. – Really???)