Ann Patchett's Latest Novel: Tom Lake

 

I am predicting an uptick in readers of Thornton Wilder's Our Town now that Ann Patchett's new novel is out. The play is central to the novel's plot, first as Laura (who becomes Lara) decides at the last minute to try out of the role of Emily in a local production of the play after seeing the abysmal auditions of the other potential Emilys and then as she goes on to play the role in summer stock theatre in Michigan. 

Now in her late fifties, Lara is telling her three daughters, in episodes, about that experience at Tom Lake near the cherry orchards of Michigan. The three grown daughters are waiting out the pandemic at their parents' home, something Lara admits to herself she enjoys. Central to the narrative is one of her co-stars, Peter Duke, with whom she had a summer fling. Duke has gone on to achieve movie star status, leading to curiosity of her girls, particularly Emily, the oldest, who at one point believed he might have been her father.

The full role of the girls' actual father Joe, who has inherited the Nelson orchards, becomes more apparent as the story unfolds. As one would expect in a story woven around a play, Patchett has assembled a curious cast of characters--Lara's understudy Pallace, a Black dancer to whom Duke's brother "Saint Sebastian" is drawn; Uncle Wallace, a former TV star now playing the Stage Manager; Mr. Ripley, who chanced to discover Lara while watching his niece in the play and brought her to Hollywood for a movie role.

The three daughters are also distinctly rendered--Emily has been preparing her whole life to take over the family farm along with Benny, literally the boy next door. Maisie has not completed veterinary school, but the neighbors call on her for all their animal emergencies from birth to death. Nell, the youngest, wants to be an actor.

The impact of story--those we want to hear, those we are expected to tell--is an important part of the novel, including the impact of different perspectives on the interpretation of an event--or of a play. Lara says, "I learned so many things that summer at Tom Lake, and most of those lessons I would have gladly done without." 

Perhaps the most universal lesson, both for the novel and for the play it is wrapped around, is the one Patchett noted at her book launch: Life is so brief, just a piling up a little moments. Before you know it, you're in Act 3.

Ann Patchett's Latest Novel: Tom Lake

When the Fiction Reader Encounters Great Nonfiction

 

I may be losing my credibility as a reader who prefers fiction, but I keep finding memoirs and other clever nonfiction books landing on my stack and completely capturing my focus. Of course, I've been an Ann Patchett fan since I read Bel Canto. Since moving to Nashville where I can drop by Parnassus Books, which she co-owns with Karen Hayes, I find more reasons to admire her work and her advocacy for books and for authors. I bought her latest collection of essays These Precious Days (evoking "September Song") as soon as it came out, but for some reason delayed beginning. I know that when it's time, a book finds me. By sharing her own life, she opens up a world to readers. Asked which is my favorite, the answer would change on any given day.

She writes about her "three fathers," her home, books and authors she loves. One particularly tender story is the account of the time Tom Hanks' assistant moved into Patchett's house during COVID while undergoing a cancer trial. I also suspect that I am not the only person who finishes this book with a longer "to read next" list.

By no coincidence, I read Mary Laura Philpott's latest memoir Bomb Shelter, after hearing her speak at a Parnassus event. Rather than focusing on book sales, she took the time to raise awareness of the good work of Vanderbilt's Monroe Carrell Children's Hospital, where her son was treated after the sudden onset of epileptic seizures.

At the event, I also had the opportunity of meeting Dr. Jay Wellons, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Vanderbilt, whose first book All That Moves Us was released this month and merits a review all its own.

In a completely different vein, I have been recommending A. J. Jacobs' The Puzzler to anyone who, like me is obsessed with puzzles and word play. Jacobs, who may be best known for his earlier work of nonfiction The Year of Living Biblically, goes chapter-by-chapter through all types of puzzles. He starts with crossword puzzles, then discusses the New York Times' Spelling Bee, which has a surprising number of people waking in the wee hours and starting on the newest bee, published daily at 3 am EST. He also discusses the Rubik's cube, jigsaw puzzles, logic problems, and so much more. The writing is clever and the audiobook, which he reads himself, offers a pdf of the puzzles from the book that are difficult to translate into words. (He also includes some special puzzles at the end of each chapter specifically for audiobook listeners.) Since I blame crossword puzzles for slipping to third place in the 6th grade race for class rank and since I must admit that if I get up to use the restroom in the middle of the night, I check the spelling bee, this book spoke my language.

The End of Average by Todd Rose was recommended by a colleague who is ahead of me in our doctoral studies. For someone who is statistically challenged, this book was a reassuring consideration of how averages can be misused, to the detriment of students, work productivity, and even pilot error. 

Rose uses stories that are both interesting and true to draw attention to ways that an obsession with average has its drawbacks. This book served as a perfect companion to my favorite nonfiction book of the year Range by David Epstein. Rose, like Epstein, isn't ready to dismantle academic research, but her encourages readers to consider different perspectives. After all, he points out, no one is average.

When the Fiction Reader Encounters Great Nonfiction

Ann Patchett's The Dutch House: This Fall's Must Read

I was an Ann Patchett fan before I moved to Nashville--probably even before I realized she lived in Nashville. I first discovered her when I read Bel Canto, which remains a favorite. Since she partnered with Karen Hayes to open Parnassus Books, one of the best independent bookstores anywhere, she has kept busy not only writing her own books but championing those of other writers here in Nashville and elsewhere.

When I first meet the college freshmen I teach, I give my soapbox speech about balancing academics and the other aspects of life. Don't live in Nashville and never leave campus, I advise them. I suggest they discover all the freebies and good deals for college students. They need to visit the Frist Art Museum (frequently), Cheekwood Mansion and Botanical Gardens, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and the Ryman Auditorium. And they need to discover Parnassus Books, within an easy walking distance of campus (something I know, having attended Lipscomb when freshmen weren't allowed to have cars. I walked or biked to Green Hills before Green Hills was cool.)

Patchett's most recent novel The Dutch House lives up to the high expectations of her readers. Told by Danny, this is the story of two siblings brought up by their father in a grand and unusual house in the suburbs outside Philadelphia when their mother abandons the family. The story takes a Cinderella turn when their father remarries and then dies suddenly, leaving Danny and his sister Maeve without family or a home.

Whenever Danny returns as an adult to visit his sister, the two of them invariably find themselves parked across the street from their former home, still occupied by their stepmother. Over time, they grow more nostalgic over the shared time in the car than in the house.

I sometimes had to remind myself that Danny's voice was the creation of a female writer. Everything about his character was believable. The dynamics of his relationship with Maeve was genuine without being over-sentimentalized. I liked them both. The other characters in the story--the two sisters who kept the Dutch House, as well as Fluffy, Danny's baby nurse who lost her job for striking the boy with a spoon, were believable and endearing. Even the stepmother Andrea and Elna, their long-absent mother, are much more than one-dimensional stereotypes.

While conventional wisdom advises against judging a book by its cover, the illustration on this particular novel, a rendering by a Nashville artist of the painting of young Maeve described in the book is both beautiful and haunting. When I think of iconic book covers, I expect this one to join the list; I also think this novel will be on reading lists for years to come.

Ann Patchett's The Dutch House: This Fall's Must Read

Southern Festival of Books: Nashville Has More than Music!

Even before moving to Nashville in 2016, I found ways to get here in October for the Southern Festival of Books presented by Humanities Tennessee. This free event, held in the downtown Nashville Public Library and extending up the hill to War Memorial Auditorium is a feast for book lovers. Between the two edifices are booths--books vendors, authors, writing programs--and stages featuring music, poetry and more.

Now that I am settled here, I have to study the schedule, choosing between so many excellent sessions, many in the same time slots. Opening the first session in the library auditorium was country singer Rory Feek, who lost his wife and singing partner to cancer a few years ago. He opened his session with songs, then read from his memoirs about his courtship and marriage to Joey, as well as The Cow Said Neigh, his children's book. He invited his young daughter Indiana to join him on stage, and she promptly curled up in his lap and fell asleep, a perfect visual for his newest children's book The Way God Made You.

Discussing Mothers and Strangers: Essays on Motherhood from the New South, Samia Serageldin, who first dreamed up the anthology was joined by Marshall Chapman and Belle Boggs, two of the authors who shared the stories of their mothers in the book. Serageldin first conceived the idea for the book when her mother died in Cairo the same day another friend lost her mom. She mentioned the possible project to author Lee Smith, who ran with it, bringing in more stories than they had room to include.

Each of the women read from her own story: Serageldin told the story of a hypercritical mother; Chapman shared details about the woman whose daughter called "a great human but terrible mother.
Boggs, whose mother is still living and whose daughter Beatrice sat on the front row, read her essay considering her daughter as a reincarnation of her mother. With twenty-seven authors, many of them from my former home state of North Carolina, contributing stories of their mothers, the book not only promises poignant reading, but will likely evoke readers' memories of their own mothers.

A crowd lined up waiting for the doors to open on Saturday morning for the WNBA sponsored "Breakfast with the Authors," with Mary Laura Philpott interviewing Alexi Zentner (Copperhead), Anissa Gray (The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls), Karen Thompson Walker (Dreamers), and Taylor Jenkins Reid (Daisy Jones and the Six). One Instagram worthy feature of the breakfast was the miniature cupcakes topped with sugary miniatures of each of the four authors' novels--too pretty to eat.

While some audience members seemed to direct questions to Reid, whose novel was a Reese Witherspoon Book Club selection, all four books were so appealing that audience members had to debate whether or not to miss the next session in order to line up for the book signings that followed on the War Memorial Plaza.

Another particularly popular session featured Nashville: Scenes from the New American South with photographer Heidi Ross and Nashville writer and bookseller Ann Patchett, who wrote the captions and one of the essays in the book. The assignment came from New York editor Liz Sullivan, who had not actually been to Nashville, but who had a particular vision for the book: Nashville in present tense, not a retrospective--and plenty of white space. Even Ross and Patchett found that they had separate versions of Nashville, which occasionally overlapped.

They described their pleasure that so many people they invited to participate agreed to be photographed. Ross told particular stories of some of the photographs--a session with Al Gore in the same green room where he had once learned that he had lost the presidential race. She particularly prizes a picture her husband snapped in the room of her photographing the former vice president. Just as touching, though, was her account of a photograph she took of a homeless man--with his permission--when she dropped her camera and broke the lens.

The two women and their editor had to wrangle over some of the choices. Patchett thought there were too  many murals; her editor loved them.  The had to fight Sullivan to include the Predators photo, not just because it matched the color palette of a photograph of monks on the facing page, but because they believed the book would be incomplete without the team. ("They thank us at ever game," Ross quipped.)

After facilitating the earlier session, Philpott returned to share the stage with Dani Shapiro, discussing her  collection I Miss You When I Blink, a memoir collection whose narrative arc examines her attempts to break free of the perfectionism laid on her by her mother. Shapiro's latest book Inheritance also tells her own story, in this case the aftermath of a DNA test she took "recreationally," revealing that the man she considered her dad was not her biological father. Since the discovery came after the death of her parents, she had to decide to pursue the truth about her origin.

Ann Patchett shared the stage of War Memorial Auditorium with Margaret Renkl, a Nashville writer who contributes essays to the New York Times. Her recent publication Late Migrations, a collection of very short pieces that combine naturalist writing, memoir, and family history, is causing a storm in the publishing world. Not only is the writing brilliant, but the illustrations by her brother a collage artist make the book a library addition worth collecting.

For book lovers--whether they prefer fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or even cookbooks--the Southern Festival of Books should be a annual event. With Nashville musicians performing throughout the weekend, the festival is a sampler of  the best Nashville has to offer.

Southern Festival of Books: Nashville Has More than Music!

A Gentleman in Moscow: My Favorite Recommendation

It's not unusual for me to start encouraging others to read a book before I'm even finished reading it. Some books just seem perfect for  my reading friends. When I started Amor Towles' latest novel A Gentleman in Moscow, I felt that way--but even more so. I was ready to recommend it to my book club based on just a few chapters. I called my mother and told her to read it. Meanwhile, I kept reading, and I was not disappointed. This book is probably my favorite in awhile, which  is particularly significant because it's not dark, disturbing, or esoteric. It's not one of those books that some people just won't get.

The book opens during the Bolshevik Revolution as Count Alexander Rostov is called before a tribunal for the simple crime of being an aristocrat. Either despite or because of the measure of fame he's achieved through poetry, his judges decide that instead of putting him before a firing squad, they will sentence him to house arrest at Moscow's Metropol Hotel. The Count has already been living there for awhile, but he is moved out of his suite and forced to "downsize"--settling into a small attic room. Towels presents the details so clearly over the course of the tale, I imagine I've visited the Count's room.

During the course of his stay--the novel covers at least thirty years--he encounters delightful characters among the guests and the staff of the hotel, some ambiguous, and some straight-out antagonists. He first meets Nina, a young girl staying with her family at the Metropol who asks him about "rules for princesses." He also befriends the wait staff at the finest restaurant in the hotel--and then joins them.

Nashville novelist Ann Patchett has admitted that she just writes the same book over and over: a group of people, nothing alike, are thrown together. Towles has tales the formula and perfected it. Readers will hate "the Bishop," an inept waiter who, via the Peter Principle, manages to climb the management ladder at the Metropol. They will find delightful Anna Urbanova, the Soviet actress with her dubious back story, will  fall in love with Sofia, whom the Count raises as his daughter, and they will be amused by the Russian who comes to Rostov to be tutored in languages and culture, but ends up Brando watching films, particularly Casablanca. 

From his limited point of view, Count Rostov has a window view on Moscow--and the world. His knowledge of food, wine, and music is eclipsed by his understanding of human nature. Towles has produced a multi-layer narrative that does much more than charm the reader. The author also gives just enough of Alexander's past, especially the story of his sister's death, to give even more insight into the man.

For now, I anticipate happily the opportunity to discuss the book with others--and then to pick it up and read it one more time.

A Gentleman in Moscow: My Favorite Recommendation

Colton Whitehead's The Underground Railroad

Toward the end of the calendar year, I’m always thinking back on all the books I’ve read during the year, trying to decide which I liked best, which I would recommend to whom, which I would read again. Whenever online book sites try to recommend books for me based on what I’ve bought from them, I have to laugh. I don’t think there is an algorithm to decipher my reading preferences. I prefer literary fiction, but I read all kinds of books--autobiography, lots of poetry, spirituality, self-improvement.

I will confess, too, that I while I am a picky reader, I am no reading purist. Yes, I love to hold a book in my hands, to turn the pages, to write in the margins, but I also keep a book going on my iPad all the time, along with one in the CD player of my car. Just give me stories; just give me words.

I still have several books I plan to mention in coming posts, but I just finished Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, so I must share.  I heard Whitehead speak at Parnassus Books a few weeks ago and found him an engaging, entertaining speaker. I particularly liked his premise, writing about the Underground Railroad the way he imagined it as a child—a real train running on underground tracks. Ann Patchett, when asked who would win the Pulitzer Prize this year, predicted this one would "win it all."

Whitehead begins the book in Georgia, where Cora, a slave who still resents her own mother for running and leaving her behind, is invited to escape with Caesar, another slave on the same plantation, purchased after his Virginia owner died, failing make good on her promise to free him at her death. The master's death has left them in the hands of a particularly cruel son. Things can only get worse.

The two go first to South Carolina, deceptively safe for awhile. She works first in the home of a local family, and then at the history museum’s live exhibit, sometimes reenacting live on the plantation, sometimes on the slave ship. Then her past threatens to catch up with her.

Their next stop takes them to North Carolina, where state laws have recently closed the doors on all blacks, free or slaves, with a gruesome Friday night ritual she witnesses from the attic where she hides, virtually enslaved again.

Always just over her shoulder is the infamous slave catcher still bitter over failure to find and return Cora’s mother. Eluding him, she ends up in Indiana at a rather Utopian community of blacks, some freedmen, some mixed race members who have, at times, passed as white, and many former slaves.

Whitehead manages to weave in the first person accounts of others in Cora’s story, filling in pieces along the way. His final product is the story of one slave that translates to the story of all slaves, balancing hope and hatred, the past and the future.  Those who played a role in the real underground railroad become three-dimensional characters who might be our own neighbors. They might be ourselves. I suspect the story will haunt me for a long, long time.

Colton Whitehead's The Underground Railroad

When the Author and the Bookseller Are the Same Person

I became a fan of Ann Patchett's fiction long before I moved to Nashville. In fact, after I read Bel Canto, the first book of hers to come across my radar, I wrote a review that was published in English Journal, the secondary education professional publication of the National Council of Teachers of English. What I found in that book was a work of literary fiction I could recommend to readers who wanted a suspense novel. The novel and its characters stuck with me the way many books never do.

Since then, I have read everything Patchett writes, fiction or nonfiction. When she joined partner Karen Hayes to open Parnassus Books in Green Hills after Davis-Kidd closed, I always looked forward to trips to Nashville. This independent bookstore was a nice size with a healthy book to other stuff ratio. Obviously, the employees didn't just work there; they loved books. They talked books.

Upon moving to Nashville, I got my library card just a few blocks from Parnassus, but I headed to tho the bookstore often enough to purchase books I needed to own, not just to read. Then I discovered Salon@615, a library partnership with the bookstore that presents so many great writers at their frequent events.

Last week, the author was Ann Patchett, debuting her new novel Commonwealth.  She was getting ready to start her book tour (beginning at the airport bookstore the next morning before flying out of town. She certainly gave her audience a nice preview to the novel, reading from it and talking about how it was different from and similar to her other books.

Then she started giving suggestions of other people's books. I had my pen poised and ready. She always has a book she's revived and is sharing with others. Right now, it's Lucy Dawson's Dogs as I See them, from the 1930s. It was for sale on the table right alongside Patchett's in the lobby.

She also predicted that Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, the current Oprah Book Club selection, will win everything this year--Pulitzer, National Book Award, everything. She also mentioned his earlier book The Intuitionist, which she also loved.  Other favorites this year she mentioned several authors whose earlier books I'd loved--My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Stout (Olive Kitteredge) and A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (Rules of Civility). 

Discussing Whitehead's novel, Matthew Desmond's Evicted, and others, Patchett referred to what she calls the "Hamilton Principle": an author takes a story--World War II and the Holocaust, slavery--we all think we know and makes it new and fresh.

She also recommended Louise Erdrich's new novel La Rose. Earlier in her talk, Patchett had admitted that all her books are really the amen book: a group of strangers are thrown together in an isolate place and form a family.  Erdrich has a formula too, she said: something unspeakable always happens in the first eight pages, and the rest of the book deals with it.

She also said that one of her favorite recent novels was Jane Hamilton's The Excellent Lombards, her most autobiographical novel so far.

She also mentioned Elena Ferrant's Neapolitan novels, a quartet beginning with My Brilliant Friend. She said that anyone buying the first one must also buy the second because you will "go down that rabbit hole" and not come up until you've finished them all. She says after finishing the first one, you will have to start the next one immediately. She also recommended Edward St. Albans' Patrick Melrose novels.

Among the nonfiction she mentioned were Susan Faludi's In the Dark Room (and she also recommended her earlier book Backlash), Hope Jahren's Lab Girl, and When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi.

I left the reading clutching my new hot-off-the-press copy of Commonwealth, a bigger reading list than ever, and a new friend I met in line. I couldn't be happier.

When the Author and the Bookseller Are the Same Person

Time to Read; Time to Write

Through this most hectic of holiday periods, I have found myself woefully behind in book posts, for which I apologize. I have, though, found time to read, even when everything else in my life has been frenzied and hectic.  One drawback of a teaching career is that I hit that grading/posting deadline twice a year, not just once.  (Think of April 15 for CPAs or December 25 for Santa and the elf crew).

The first year I taught was particularly stressful, and I had the foolish misfortune of having research papers due right around the end of the first semester.  That year, as many of my students may remember, we still didn't have a tree the Saturday before Christmas and might not have had one at all had not three of the boys from the senior class delivered on  they said they had cut themselves to my driveway. It was beautiful-- at least twelve feet tall, perfect for the out high ceiling in the living room. Recently, in a Facebook conversation with the goodhearted tree givers, most of them pled the fifth or asked if the statute of limitations was up.  Enough said.

This year, though, I've read a wonderful variety of books the last three or four weeks, so I can't wait to share some of them.  I will also be taking down my wall calendar for 2013 so I can transcribe a list of everything I read in the past year.

For now, though, I want to mention one I'm not quite through reading, Ann Patchett's recent collection of essays and other nonfiction pieces, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. I've been a Patchett fan for years, ever since I read Bel Canto. That book captivated me for many reasons. It's one of those books that has stuck with me in ways some books don't.  I remember tiny incidences, specific characters, impressions from the book.  I've had the chance to hear her speak three times--once with Allan Gurganus, one of her professors and a gentleman I have grown to admire for his writing and for his generosity of spirit, one at the NCTE convention in Nashville several years ago (in which she reinforced her support of assigning the classics to high school students), and recently at UNC-Asheville.

Reading through this recent collection, I sometimes feel guilty for presuming to think I know an author simply because I've read her books, for even daring to think I could breach her wall of privacy.  She comes across as both private and approachable, a confusing mix.  Since I always visit Parnassus Books, the store she co-owns, when I'm in Nashville, and because she lives in a city I've loved since my own college years, I am always overwhelmed by the sense of the familiar when I read her essays.

I also feel a particular connection when she touches on topics of interest to me.  Case in point:  She has one essay explaining the controversy that arose when Clemson selected her memoir Truth and Beauty as their freshman read, after which an alum decided the book was vile, as must be its author.  She also publishes the speech she wrote and delivered at Clemson (accompanied by a bodyguard provided by the college.)  My overwhelming takeaway is the need for students--especially college students--to see their educations as something in which they engage, not as something done to them.

When I make reading assignments in my classes, I try to do so with conscientious purpose.  I would never choose something prurient for the sake of shock; however, I sometimes find a book or a story worth reading together, even when I find some ideas or language or situations objectionable.  Teaching English and literature, I've always believed, is about teaching people to think.  I don't know if it's possible to teach anyone HOW to think, but I certainly try to encourage the process of critical thinking. Already, I'm considering ways to interject some of these pieces in my upcoming composition  course, where I hope to engage my students in thinking, talking, and writing about their own learning, their educational goals, the development of their own system of values, perhaps shaped by their families, but adopted intentionally.  I don't think they'll find any of that in Spark Notes.

Time to Read; Time to Write