the writer on her novel, 'Tom Lake'

Ann Patchett’s new novel, Tom Lake, is not so much one in which secrets are revealed, as one in which perceptions are altered. "I was struck by the realisation that we don’t really know what our parents’ lives were like," Patchett says. "We may have an idea, a story we pieced together, and believe those are the facts – but they’re not." It’s those subtle shifts in understanding that Patchett – an author whose books are critically lauded yet also rise up the bestseller charts – is so skilled at portraying.

Tom Lake takes its title from an imaginary theatre company that had a formative influence on its protagonist, Lara. As a young woman, she had aspired to a career as an actress and starred as Emily in Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play, 'Our Town' – a classic tale of small-town American life.

When the book opens in the spring of 2020 (this is a pandemic novel created with the very lightest of touches), Lara has long since abandoned her theatrical ambitions and is the mother of three grown daughters, who have just returned to the northern-Michigan family farm in a cherry orchard (there are resonances of Chekhov’s play here). Bored in pandemic isolation, the siblings find themselves delving into their mother’s past, and attempting to uncover the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom Lara had shared both a stage and a romance many years before. Wilder’s play, with its insight into the nature of family and community connections, forms a rich background to Patchett’s text, which sets the longings of the past (romance, the prospect of fame) against the conflicted domestic satisfactions of the present. Is the stability of married love truly compatible with personal fulfilment?

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Ever since the publication of her first novel, 1992’s The Patron Saint of Liars, Patchett has demonstrated her talent for mining the depths of human emotions. Her 2002 novel about terrorist hostages, Bel Canto, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction; more recently, she was awarded the 2021 National Medal for the Humanities, one of America’s highest official honours in the arts. She was praised in a White House statement "for putting into words the beauty, pain and complexity of human nature" – and another of her admirers is Meryl Streep, who has lent her talents to the reading of Tom Lake on audiobook.

Patchett being awarded her National Medal for the Humanities in 2021 by President Joe Biden

Patchett’s latest work continues her commitment to taking seemingly simple experiences and turning them into art, and compelling page-turners too. "Quiet moments of drama have always been my thing," she says. "I think that they’re what life is made up of. I am interested in – imprisonment isn’t exactly the right word – what you can’t get out of. People always say, 'You’re so obsessed with the family', but that’s because you can’t get rid of them! You have to stay and work it out."

Ann Patchett Tom Lake (Hardback)

Ann Patchett Tom Lake (Hardback)

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Patchett herself has worked it out for decades with her husband Karl VanDevender, a physician who studied philosophy and theology before turning to medicine. The pair are based in Nashville, Tennessee, where they have built a life that encompasses literature and the broadest definition of what family can be, one that crosses generations and goes beyond simple connections of blood. She has written remarkable essays about being with Karl; about caring for her grandmother Eva as she was dying; about the extraordinary relationship she forged with Sooki Raphael, a painter who also happened to be her friend Tom Hanks’ long-time assistant, and who came to Nashville to stay with Patchett and VanDevender while undergoing cancer treatment. (Raphael died in 2021; their friendship was the subject of the title essay of Patchett’s last collection, These Precious Days.)

Also part of Patchett’s extended family are the customers who frequent her independent bookstore, Parnassus Books, which she co-founded in 2011. It enriches her existence, she says, by enabling her to feel part of a community far beyond her desk. "I can’t undo the wrongs of the world," she tells me, "And I don’t want to spend another second of my life trying. I do not want to spend any more of my energy on things that I cannot change. I want to change what I can. I want to put my energy into doing the good that I actually can do. I know what to do. I’m going to do it. I do it every day."

At this point, she draws our conversation to a close because she’s about to meet a long-time reader at the airport in Nashville; the woman’s dream was to meet Patchett, and Patchett can realise it. Simple gifts: she can write her books; she can promote the work she loves; she can connect with readers. As her fiction continually proves, a good life is one lived in small actions, day to day, and onwards.

‘Tom Lake’ by Ann Patchett (£18.99, Bloomsbury) is out now.

This piece was originally published in the September 2023 issue of Harper's Bazaar – out now.

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