I was mostly bored throughout the entirety of Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. It was a chore to get through from the very first paragraph. I also don’t think the premise is something that speaks to me. I’m not interested in actors or their vices, their lifestyle or their attention-seeking. So maybe this book was never going to be one I connected with. I will say that the setting (of one half of the novel’s timeline) of the cherry farm had its charm, and I appreciated the simple life and the simple love the protagonist chose, but it wasn’t enough to carry the entire novel.
I ultimately didn’t like it very much largely because I didn’t like the protagonist, Lara. She’s all, “oops I fell into the life I wanted, oops I slept with my best friend’s boyfriend (who happened to statutorily rape us both, hashtag life of a young theatre kid, am I right), oops everything comes easily for me, oops I’m not above sleeping with you to get the job on Broadway but also oops thank goodness I don’t have to lol, oops gotta casually have an abortion after being seriously degraded in a mental hospital—thank goodness I didn’t sleep with the father’s brother that same night like I considered or else this coulda potentially maybe complicate my life [and no, I don’t consider that a spoiler because it’s a blip of a plot point that happens in the space of a paragraph], oops thank goodness my saint of a husband doesn’t at all mind his daughters romanticizing my past summer fling over their life with him as their father and me enabling it.”
I’m sure reading that was just as annoying as writing it. But writing those annoyances out actually made me realize that some actually heavy things occurred in the novel, but there was no depth attached to any of it, so it’s actually a misrepresentation of the novel. Everything that could potentially haunt a person or deeply impact them (statutory rape, being in an industry that reduces you to a sexual commodity, having an abortion) was waved over and so minor they could have not even be included.
Lara really didn’t have a personality. Things just happened to her and that was the novel. She was so undefinable as herself that most everyone in the novel calls her Emily, the name of her favorite character to play as an actress. But it wasn’t just Lara. None of the characters had a distinguishable personality. Duke was defined by his vices, Joe was perfection itself and also avoided and mentioned as little as possible because he got in the way of the romanticization, the daughters were supposed to have distinct personalities but had little opportunity to display them.
Everything about it was just boring and dull. In retrospect, maybe a tad offensive with how boring and dull it treated serious topics in service of romanticizing a toxic relationship and lifestyle.
P.S. Apparently Our Town is an actual play? I definitely thought the author had made up a play to present in the novel, though I was a bit confused that she was writing about it as though the readers knew the plot and characters…that makes more sense now. It’s such a huge part of the novel, it might be helpful to be familiar with the play beforehand.
