Cherry-picking Lara's past life provides a warm, satisfying experience

Tom Lake
Ann Patchett
Bloomsbury

In this exquisitely constructed novel, Ann Patchett cements her reputation as one of America’s leading contemporary writers.

Though the gentle, almost elegiac tone of the book may disappoint some readers looking for drama, it is an almost perfect telling of a tale and a reflection on the art of storytelling at the same time.

Lara, her husband Joe Nelson and their three young adult daughters are together on their cherry farm in rural America, confined by the pandemic, and, in the absence of the usual seasonal workers, battling to get the cherries picked before they rot.

To keep them entertained while the harvesting goes on, the girls – feisty, angry Emily, practical Maisie and gentle aspiring actress Nell – get their mother to tell them about her youthful affair with famous Oscar-winning actor Peter Duke, in the days before he achieved fame.

It happened one summer when Lara and Peter Duke were acting in a repertory company in a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Lara had made the role her own when still at school, and was on the verge of a career in Hollywood, her first (and only) film already in the can.

But one summer can change a lot, just as the pandemic summer may change things, or at least perceptions, for the Nelson family.

Lara tells the girls some of the story, and relives the rest in her own mind. So the novel is told in two time frames: the current, quite literally cherry-picking, version that the girls lap up and clamour for more while they work among the trees, and the revisiting of the past when Lara, Peter, Peter’s brother Sebastian and Lara’s understudy and friend Pallace were a foursome, inseparable and living out a summer fantasy as the young can and do.

Patchett creates and differentiates her characters with the minimum of telling and the maximum of showing – something many other authors could learn from.

We quickly know the differences between the three girls, understand reliable kind Joe, and see the dangers in the unstable, charismatic Peter.

There is enormous warmth in this book, and a sense of comfort. People can be kind and the past can be put behind us – even if only for the time it takes to read one deeply satisfying novel.