I finished 2023 and began 2024 by reading Ann Patchett’s latest, the very fine Tom Lake, which turned out by pure accident to be a perfect novel to open as one year gives way to another. Shifting back and forth between present day and past, the story looks backward to events that transpired long ago and simultaneously anticipates the characters’ resolutions for the future. Sixteen-year-old Laura Kenison, who will soon drop the “u” to become Lara in honor of her favorite character in Doctor Zhivago, is a high school student helping with the casting of a small-town production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town when she decides to audition for the role of Emily Webb herself. She gets the part, and then, boom, we learn that the day of the casting occurred decades ago, and that Lara is telling the story of her first role onstage to her three grown daughters as they pick cherries from the orchard on their family farm. At this point we inevitably register a Chekhov alert: the mother who was a former actress, the three sisters, the cherry orchard. But Patchett requires no knowledge of Chekhov for a reader to enjoy this intricately and deftly structured novel. For those who do know the work of Russia’s first modern playwright, Patchett strikes a Chekhovian tone of rueful comedy balanced with stoical tragedy. There are villains and heroes, but the villainy comes with a quietly redeeming asterisk, and the heroism takes the form of everyday decency. It’s a rewarding and solidly satisfying book.
In hands less skilled than Patchett’s, the framed narrative might be merely irritating. As she and her daughters pick cherries, Lara doles out in tiny pieces the story of her summer at Tom Lake in rural Michigan, when she was in her early 20’s and beautiful and talented and again playing Emily in a production of Our Town. That was when she fell in love with the dashing Peter Duke, three years older, unbearably handsome, and every bit the charming rogue we have known from literature of the past six centuries. I have long been a Patchett fan and have never thought of her as prudish, but there’s a lot more sex in this book than I recall from previous works. And the sex is vital to the plot. In one particularly shocking scene that comes at the end, Patchett uses a sordid assignation in a bathroom as a way of emphasizing just how disgustingly self-absorbed one particular character is and has always been. It’s a sad, appalling, and entirely believable moment of degradation, and no reader is likely to forget it. But it’s a low point in a novel that offers plenty of high points. Tom Lake swings from the interior depths of the theater to the gorgeous expanses of the great outdoors, from lust to love, from love to indifference, from youthful naivete to aged wisdom, from wild flings to serene happiness. I have a little trouble believing that actors in a Sam Shepard play are going to get actually drunk in the course of the play, but that’s my only quibble with a backstage portrait of a woman unafraid to tell her extraordinary story.
As Ann Patchett salutes Chekhov in Tom Lake, Daniel Mason in North Woods evokes at various turns Henry David Thoreau, Mary Rowlandson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Saunders, James Joyce, John Steinbeck, Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Bronte, and William Blake. My God, when I got to the end of this astonishing miscellany of a novel, a book that grows better and stranger and grander with every page, I tossed my catalogue of literary influences aside and decided that what I was reading was pure Daniel Mason, a writer as original and daring and stunning in his range as anybody practicing the art today. Mason joins Bruce Holsinger as a living embodiment of what I consider the ideal life: professor at a major university by day (in Mason’s case, Stanford), writer of dazzling and commercially successful fiction at night. And with this ever surprising novel, a mixture of genres and voices, a mock-scrapbook of images, ballads, and ever-shifting prose pieces, Mason celebrates what the ancients called the genius loci, the animating spirit of a place.
That place is a habitation in western Massachusetts first settled by a pair of unnamed colonial-era lovers fleeing the wrath of Puritan settlers. Time passes and brings Charles Osgood, a man obsessed with apples who has found the perfect specimen growing on this land. Mason is unafraid to evoke parallels with Eden, but there’s nothing formulaic or predictable in the story of Osgood and then of his twin daughters and then of the various folks who follow as we progress into the modern day. At one point Mason provides a passionate sex scene with beetles. At another, recalling Steinbeck’s tortoise carrying a seed from one side of the highway to another, he follows a spore as it hitches a ride to a vulnerable stand of chestnut trees. When the first ghost appeared, I laughed out loud, as much for the surprising delight at the intrusion of the supernatural as for the karmic justice that the ghost was about to deliver. By the end Mason dares like Anthony Doerr in Cloud Cuckoo Land to leap into the future, and I will not risk spoiling anything in the final glorious pages except to say that the final sentence left me awed and overwhelmed with admiration. This book appeared on many Ten-Best lists for 2023, and even though this new year is only a couple of weeks old, I am certain that it will be one of the ten best books I will read in 2024. How can there be ten better?