Next, dive into TOM LAKE – the breath-taking new novel from Ann Patchett
'Dazzling … life-affirming and compulsively readable' Sunday Times
'Patchett blends wisdom and humanity jointly with the icy forensic gaze of someone not afraid to expose the frailties of human behaviour ... Read it' Jojo Moyes
'An outstanding novel ... a master of her art' Observer
It is 1964: Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited and notices a heart stoppingly beautiful woman. When he kisses Beverly Keating, his host’s wife, he sets in motion the joining of two families, whose shared fate will be defined on a day seven years later.
In 1988, Franny Keating, now twenty-four, is working as a cocktail waitress in Chicago. When she meets the famous author Leon Posen one night at the bar, and tells him about her family, she unwittingly relinquishes control over their story…
I feel like the things that were interesting about this book were things that I didn't like, namely that everything juicy is implied. Most of what actually makes it to the page are banal scenes, and while I do admire Patchett's ability to create a story out of the mundane and to realize the full power of implication, I couldn't help but feel frustrated by this narrative technique. It felt very anticlimactic to me! The jumpiness - the non-linear narrative, the multiple character perspectives - prevented me from ever being fully absorbed into the story. There are a lot of characters to juggle here, and most only get the briefest time to shine. (But then in the first chapter we hear from a priest who goes on to marry the sister of one of the main characters and who is never heard from again, which is just like... why.) There never seemed to be a focal point - the summary implies that it's about a famous novelist repurposing the true story of one family's tragedy, but the relationship between Franny and the novelist isn't explored at all. We see only the beginning and end of the relationship, and while Patchett does a wonderful job of showing the dynamics between them in those few scenes, it feels disingenuous to say that the book is really "about" that. In fact, it didn't really seem to be "about" anything the dust jacket claims: the exploration of blended family dynamics felt flat, the theme of family tragedy was surface-level. I just never really believed that these were people who experienced deep trauma. The prose itself was pretty ordinary - nothing to marvel at technically. I can appreciate what novel is trying to do, and there were a lot of sparks of potential, but I simply never felt like the story or the characters were that interesting, and by the end I was very ready to move on to something else on my to-read pile.
