Tom Lake by Ann Patchett review – homespun happiness

Ann Patchett’s fourth novel, the hostage drama Bel Canto, propelled her to literary fame in 2001, winning the Women’s prize for fiction. Two solid novels followed, Run and State of Wonder, but Patchett has produced the best fiction of her career in recent years, with the magnificent family dramas Commonwealth (2016) and The Dutch House (2019), a finalist for the Pulitzer prize. There has been nonfiction, too, with two essay collections, including These Precious Days (2021), the centrepiece of which is a Harper’s magazine piece that went viral about Patchett’s lockdown friendship with Tom Hanks’s assistant, Sooki Raphael. Raphael moved into Patchett’s Nashville home to start a clinical trial for the recurrent pancreatic cancer that would ultimately end her life, and Patchett turned this into a deep exploration of kindness, death and resilience.

The key to Patchett’s appeal, both in essays and novels, is her very particular tone: decent, steady, unthreatening, with a low hum of intelligence that is somehow rooted in the old-fashioned, friendly but steely American decorum that spawned Louisa May Alcott – and, indeed, Tom Hanks (who, incidentally, narrates the audiobook of The Dutch House). A solid determination to see the good in people, even those who behave badly, generates a feeling that humanity may be salvageable after all. Throw in impressive storytelling skills and an ability to harness and control narrative and thematic complexities, and the result is transporting, intelligent, accessible fiction.

Patchett’s chief message is that life is precarious, but precious too. This idea takes centre stage in Tom Lake, which is possibly the most upbeat pandemic novel to come from any major author so far. Set on a Michigan cherry orchard, it is narrated by the gentle Lara, 57, mother to three girls: Emily, 26, who will one day run the fruit farm; Maisie, 24, a vet; and Nell, 22, a drama student. The girls’ lives have been abruptly curtailed by Covid-19 and, as they pull together to harvest the fruit while the labourers are locking down elsewhere, they ask their mother to tell them about a romance she once had with a famous Hollywood actor, Peter Duke.

Lara, somewhat reluctantly, describes how, in her early 20s, having been “discovered” by a Hollywood producer, she ended up at Tom Lake in Michigan, starring in a summer production of the classic play Our Town with the wild, handsome, charismatic, then unknown “Duke”. “We ate and drank and slept our art, pounded our art into the mattress,” she recalls.

Glowing memories are interspersed with present-day farm life, both fruit-picking technicalities and the cosy domesticity of freshly baked apple cakes and clothes mending. The global catastrophe is happening elsewhere, only briefly glimpsed on screens. Even then, Lara advises her girls to look at the “explosion of white petals” outside the window instead. Her delight at having her children home is overwhelming. “I understand that joy is inappropriate these days,” she says, “and still, we feel what we feel.”

This, of course, is all true: some empty nesters did feel joyful, having their young adults back during the pandemic, though the joy was easier for those with health, space and money. Readers who experienced a very different lockdown, involving poverty, panic, loss, grief, anguish or violence may find the homespun happiness harder to absorb. Still, there are universal messages of hope and resilience here. The rhythms of the land and farming offer grounding continuity; the farm even has its own cemetery where previous generations are buried. “They had never been anywhere else,” Lara thinks. “They had never wanted to be anywhere else.” This could be decidedly reductive, but then perhaps kneejerk cynicism is a bigger modern problem? Patchett, at least, offers firm instructions for living in the face of uncertainty and destruction: seek contentment in the ordinary, learn to value what you have.

The younger generation do inject some darker notes. As Emily puts it, “the planet is fucked”. She is to marry Benny, the preternaturally devoted farm boy next door, but, for the planet’s sake, they have decided not to have children. Her sisters agree. On hearing this, their steady father, Joe, “who never walks away from us”, walks away to stare at the trees.

Lara’s bittersweet memories of youth can be less compelling than the modern sections, mostly because Duke remains – for Lara, but also for us – somewhat emblematic. The weaving together of timelines is skilful, though, and thematically interesting too, because this is also a novel about storytelling: the circling and rhythms of narrative, what is included, what left out, how narrators frame events, how stories intersect, layer and colour each other, and how their telling must always change. When Lara tells her girls that hard-drinking Duke was “nuts”, her daughters gently scold her for pejorative labelling.

Duke’s drunken “craziness” was always kept in check by his brother, “Saint Sebastian”, a sensible tennis coach who, that summer, fell for Lara’s dancer friend Pallas. Lara tells her girls that, at first, life at the lake was a blissful whirl of plays, swims and doubles tennis. When the inevitable heartbreak comes, she presents it with mild equilibrium: “I learned so many things that summer … most of those lessons I would have gladly done without.” She has no real regrets, though, because it brought her to Joe, the farm, her girls.

An engaging exploration of contentment, Tom Lake is less heavy-hitting than the last two novels, but those who want fiction to soothe, bolster and cheer will love it. What’s more, Meryl Streep is narrating the audiobook, so delight, there, is pretty much guaranteed.

• Lucy Atkins’s latest novel is Windmill Hill (Quercus). Tom Lake by Ann Patchett is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.