Tom Lake was published by HarperCollins in 2023. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Lara and her husband Joe — cherry farmers in northern Michigan — have their three adult daughters home for the harvest. As they pick cherries together, the daughters ask Lara to tell them about her youthful romance with Peter Duke, an actor who went on to become a major movie star. Lara obliges, telling the story of the summer she spent at Tom Lake — a summer theater in Michigan — where she played Emily in Our Town opposite the young, unknown Peter Duke.
The novel takes Wilder’s Our Town as its structural model: it is about the dailiness of life, the way extraordinary moments are embedded in ordinary ones, and the recognition (which comes too late, always too late) that every passing day was precious. Lara’s story is not tragic — her affair with Peter Duke ended, she married Joe, she raised daughters, she grew cherries — and Patchett insists that this un-dramatic life is not a diminishment but a choice, and a good one. The daughters, steeped in a culture that valorizes fame and romance, struggle to understand how their mother could have had a movie star and chosen a farmer instead.
Patchett’s structural conceit is elegant: by confining the “present” to the cherry harvest (physical labor, family meals, the rhythms of agricultural work) and the “past” to Lara’s narration, she creates a counterpoint between the life lived and the life told — and shows that the telling is always a simplification, always a performance, always shaped by what the teller needs the audience to hear.
Collecting Tom Lake
First edition (HarperCollins, New York, 2023): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$30
- Very good: $8–$15