Cherry Waves: Young Love in Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake: A Review

In the haze of youthful, summer love, what do we take with us as we age? Are the memories of those summer evenings glowing delicate with lightning bugs a part of us, intrinsically, forever? Tom Lake by Ann Patchett seeks to answer these questions, with prose that can only be described as soft and cinematic. Patchett weaves the tender and the sacred together through a story of summer love as lived by a lake; Tom Lake, in Michigan, to be exact, while the main character finds herself in the middle of a theatrical production of Our Town. 

Lara, her husband, and three grown daughters set the stage for the reality of the present, or our shared immediate past, the reality of the Covid-19 pandemic. For many of us, it meant huddling in isolation away from the world. For Lara and her family, it meant staying close to the family home, which is also a fully operating cherry orchard. Or at least it was, before the Nelsons had to send their workers home to isolate themselves in the same way. In the timelessness that was the pandemic, a slow thrall to the hours that lay with a certain heaviness not experienced before, Lara’s daughters grow restless, and demand to hear the story of Lara’s short but passionate love affair with famed actor Peter Duke. 

It is in this way that Tom Lake overlaps the currents of past and the continuous ebbing together. We as the reader gracefully dance between Lara at 24 and Lara at 57, with Laura’s narration not changing much between both time periods. Tom Lake reads like skipping a smooth stone across a body of water.  Through the entirety of Tom Lake,  we, the readers, arrive at a realization through Lara’s recapturing of memories that all love is more alike than different, but most importantly, sacred. 

In Lara’s present reality, where she is 57 and married with three adult children, she is married to Joe, a quiet and structured man who spends his days outside, harvesting and farming the cherries on their family orchard. The reader feels a constant, stable warmth with the presence of Joe, the type of love that one would only hope to manifest in their later years with their marriage partner. Joe’s character acts as backdrop and anchor to the story of Lara’s young love with Peter Duke. Joe is the man both Lara and the reader of Tom Lake return to after Lara spends yet another restless evening revealing the secrets of her time during the production of Our Town by Tom Lake, in Michigan.  Lara does not reveal all, though. Part of the charm of Tom Lake by Ann Patchett is that it calls into question: what are the stories we tell and what are the stories we keep to ourselves-even from our own children? How do we maintain and validate what must remain sacred in our hearts, even for our own preservation?  

Lara, Peter Duke, and the other people she meets while acting in Tom Lake, Michigan, all share in similar longings and desires: they are young, creative, talented, and away from home. They fumble into adult scenarios and relationships as a child would fumble when first riding a bike without training wheels. They are imperfect, sometimes devastatingly so, and they are human. Their days are spent rehearsing Our Town and smoking occasional cigarettes and swimming in the lake. They feel real, because they are real. They beg the reader to recall their own experience of young love, nights of drunkenness by the moonlight, sweating palms grasping at everything we cannot hold. Tom Lake is also a meditation on love. How our love changes, how it doesn’t. How the selves we were in the past morph into our current iteration and presence. Like small red orbs growing in bunches on the limb of a tree, we too take some time to mature and ripen. The prose of Tom Lake is like biting down sharp on a tender cherry, or like a tall glass of water on a hot summer day. It highlights the simplicity of sensory experience, and how our simple sensory experience gives way to the expression of love, and our aging bodies. Tom Lake validates the heartache and the romance of our lives, by having it interwoven with our contemporary times. A beautiful, thrilling thing.