2024~19 Tom Lake

Ann Patchett. 2023.

Several people recommended this to me and my sense coming into it was that it was going to be a feel-good book I should love.  And there were some parts of it I did love.  The coming together of three adult daughters on the family farm where they grew up during the COVID lock-down was great. I loved the mother-daughter relationships and I found the mother's delight in having everyone home, even in the midst of the stress of the world falling apart, to be a lovely backdrop to her recounting of the story-within-the-story in which she talks about her young adult acting career and brief dalliance with someone who would go on to be a famous movie star.  

The book and I got off to a rough start, though, since it starts with the mother's sexual relationship with a local high school math teacher while she was still in high school.  He was also in a sexual relationship with her best friend and likely many others as well.  This is never really situated in the story as rape, although it is presented as problematic.  With that start to the story, I was put off and had a hard time coming back from that.  The rest of the books is surprisingly free of intimate violence, so it was an odd throw away at the beginning of the book that wasn't particularly related to the rest of the story, although I suppose it provided a general backdrop of the era in which it was not particularly uncommon for a 20-something high school teacher to be engaged in sexual abuse of teens. I somehow felt like the adult woman recounting the story could have done more to situate that part of the narrative in a modern understanding that it would now be considered rape.  For me, this really highjacked the beginning of the book and it took a long while for me to regroup and follow the story, which rather quickly moved on from there, but left me wondering when and expecting that this history would become relevant at some point later.

Ultimately, this is a type of "how I met your mother" story that is extremely well written and executed.  There were descriptions of interactions between the parents and children that directly mirrored some of my own interactions with my grown children, particularly around conversations about bringing children into the world, knowing how ecologically dismal the future seems.

I can see why this book is highly regarded and loved and, setting aside the child sex abuse content at the beginning that I was unprepared for, I think I can recommend it.

Recommend.

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