On a cherry farm in Michigan, a family unexpectedly reunited by the COVID pandemic struggles to find ways to pass the time until their father drops a bombshell revelation: the handsome actor in the old favorite movie they’re watching used to be their mother’s boyfriend. Pressed into recounting the tale, 57-year-old Lara spins a yarn about a long ago summer spent putting on Our Town at a local theater company and falling in love with her co-star. Intrigued by the connection to a celebrity or perhaps just bored by the monotony of life on the far, her three adult daughters hang on every word.
Lara wasn’t always a cherry farmer, you see. While acting in a college production, she gets the kind of break everyone dreams of and finds herself cast in a bit part in a film. When the film gets stuck in post-production problems, Lara yearns to find some way to work on her acting. Deploring acting classes, her benefactor suggests she spend the summer in a stock company in out of the way Michigan. Lara’s on board as soon as she hears it will be another chance to play Emily in Our Town, the role that got her into acting in the first place.
Peter Duke, the future movie star, is also in the cast, though not playing George, as her children naturally assume. Still, Lara falls for him right away, and the two spend their summer preparing for the production and carrying out their torrid assignations. Lara also meets Peter’s saintly brother Sebastian, who helpfully takes up with Lara’s understudy, a dancer named Pallace who is also the lead in the company’s production of Cabarett.
Lara’s daughters are an oddly matched trio. Oldest daughter Emily is the practical one, closer to her father and content to take over the family farm and marry the boy next door to combine tracts. Maisie, the middle child, is a veterinarian-in-training who sometimes gets called away from her mother’s tale to tend a neighbor’s sickly pet or farm animal. Nell, the youngest, is perhaps the most invested in the story, as she desperately longs to be an actress and is going crazy having to stay on the farm.
I don’t know if Ann Patchett has daughters herself, but I almost hope not. My principle issue with Tom Lake is the horrific job she does at portraying these twenty-somethings. I know sometimes adults can regress to childhood when they’re back in their family dynamics, but Patchett has these young women behave like spoiled brats. The way they demand more information from the mother, or get mad when the story doesn’t go where they expected, is all out of proportion and unrecognizable as human behavior. I groaned when they tried to correct their mother’s un-PC language over the most minor of possible offenses.
The daughters are done no favors by the audiobook narration of Meryl Streep. Streep, who I know has daughters, should really know better. While her natural speaking voice is of course very pleasant listening, her attempts to voice the younger characters are absolutely awful. They literally sound like pre-teens. It’s bizarre.
While I can understand the daughters’ fascination with their mother’s origin story, I don’t see why I, the reader, should care at all. Lara’s narrative is fairly straightforward and unexceptional. She meets a boy, falls in love, and then for the most ordinary of reasons it doesn’t work out. The novel’s central “mystery” is how this aspiring actress wound up spending her life on a cherry farm, but that’s not much to sustain the reader’s interest.