Where Lara Chooses Her Life

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a very sweet, touching book, beautifully written. Not all of it is sweet, TBH; there are real touches, real life and real pain, even bits of darkness. But overall, it's got a kindness and gentleness that is endearing and pleasant and funny and then, I guess like real life, melancholy.

Any story that tells most of a life always feels that way to me.

I liked it, actually. I loved the narration, the story of young Lara in the past and the grown woman in the present. (I've seen Ann Patchett enough on social media that I heard the whole thing in her voice. She seems like a good person. So does Lara.) I appreciated the writing, which is seldom my main interest, but is very... smooth. And overall, I thought it was a successful book, one that wasn't quite aimed at me but I still liked, one that would probably be somebody's favorite. For me, it's a 4-star book--good, not always fun, but pleasant enough, and skillfully imagined. I didn't fly through it, though I took the last fifth of it at a gulp. Others would surely see it as a 5/5 book. (Some others might never open it. So--you know.)

Lara is retelling the story of her life to her three daughters over many days as they work on their Traverse City cherry farm, and the story goes back and forth between that present reality (in the time of COVID) and her youth, when she became a pretty successful actress but didn't keep it up. The center of the story was her relationship with Duke, a character who, in the novel's world, became a famous actor loved by everyone. We get a little Lara and Duke, a love story, then we get some Mom and daughters (with her husband making small appearances). Past and then present. The author does a great job of helping us keep straight what is happening when, which words are meant for the characters and which are only for the reader, and so on, and she does it seamlessly within the narration. Very nice.

A bigger star of the story, in a way, though he gets fewer pages, is Duke's more responsible brother, Sebastian, and the scene at the very end between Lara and Sebastian is the most emotional part of this book for me. They both loved Duke, but neither could save him from himself.

One of the things I liked about this was how real it seemed, filled with regular (to me) people, not being set in all the usual places. Yes, there's a bit of New York and a bit of LA, but it's mostly New Hampshire and Northern Michigan. It felt to me, as a native of Michigan, that this story could have actually happened (I guess at Interlochen Center for the Arts instead of Tom Lake, though Traverse City is a real place). And it could have happened to the kind of people I grew up with, I suppose, people from the midwest or small towns. That added a layer of reality to the novel that set it apart for me.

Lots to like. Recommended. I actually only picked it up because Ann Patchett is so likable on TikTok. Now I'm required to try another book. Not a new book, necessarily, but if I've never read it, it's new to me.

(IYKYK.)

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