Harsimran Kaur ON Sep 22, 2023, IN BOOK REVIEW,GHALIB: TOM LAKE BY ANN PATCHETT-FICTION
Rating: 4/5
Emily was the girl Duke dated! She was always the ‘Emily’ of ‘Our Town’ incanting a salutary of the moments that become a part of us; indelible and difficult to let go. Emily, the poised daughter of her father, roasting the mellifluous words to ingratiate the audience by her sidered charm; yes! Emily-‘the actor’ rehearsing her lines at the theatrical floor of ‘Tom Lake’. Actually, her real name is ‘Lara’ and has no compunction to add a ‘U’ to make it ‘Laura’. She is ‘Laura Kenison’ so fondly to be heard as ‘Emily’ as if the soliloquies of its rhythm chant in glory to invoke the physiognomy of the actress ‘Emily’.
Let me tell you all this is past, Emily’s past—ineffectual and unbiased! The ‘Emily’ of the present is wife of ‘Joe Nelson’ with three daughters. The threesome is perspicacious to understand their mother’s ‘love pleonasm’ with the handsome ‘Peter Duke’—the same Duke that dated Emily during their theatrical phantasmagoria.
The question now arises,
‘Why there is always intent to tell a story or for that matter an intent to listen to it?
Isn’t always this arsenal of our past stories that we delve into often to judge our self-deprecating behavior. And, just in case, in the Spartan oblivion to our past, we still crawl imperceptibly to dissenter are ‘happy demons’, it gets easy to form judgments and give a new title to our story.
Emily begins to tell a ‘love-story’. Sitting in the lust-green farm of cherries, one thinks if life too needs to be trotted carefully to avoid the rotten stinks? The permissibility of an elevated ground for cherries to go so ebulliently relates to the ‘imperfection in realities’ that makes the mind grandiose to be sentient. The red moist color is a result of a calmness to understand the harvesting & pruning & finally plucking it. I ask, ‘Isn’t life’s lessons a result of silent awareness and contemplation of actions and reactions?
‘Tom Lake’ levels up as a journey for Emily to fall in love with ‘Duke’—a star in the making and then to fall off love as it was just a whiff of dust that pestered the eyes to close to a false aggrandizement. Love of Duke and Emily; a puerile cascading wind lost in the perfidy of the saccharine rustle of leaves, pondering if it’s worth to settle on a sheath that cannot lift it forever. ‘Love’ too is ephemeral in its disruptive alliance. It sees you when it wishes to; longing is not enough to bring it back.
Ann Patchett brings in conjunction both ‘past’ and ‘present’ to understand the lives of ‘Lara’ and ‘Duke’. They fall in love at ‘Tom Lake’— a felicitated theatre in Michigan. The rehearsals, the swim at the lake, the fondness and everything that makes ‘love’ lovable brings the inherent creep to falter yet sustain for both Duke and Lara. The effervescence of Emily is non-negotiable, so is the exponential talent and sturdiness of Duke; it is as if they were meant to fall in love but the sail was not to last forever.
Why does ‘Love’ leave? A desire diminished or a dewlap of bedeviled temperaments? Or a diddle falling from self-disport, and lets not leave behind the ‘prodigal human mind’ that runs from what obnoxiously consumes it.
Lara (she is Emily too) and her three daughters give each other an ‘ear’ to possibly understand what went wrong in ‘Emily-Duke’ love-story. A de-trop slack from the daughters—“how did you fall in love with Peter Duke, the movie star?”—ironically thought of as a ‘Shepard’s pie by the daughters; the silvery layer to cover the excrescences of the past.
They all talk, riddle and snoop off the desi datum, gloss at their mother for being the love-angle of Peter Duke and deprecate her for resisting being an ‘actor’ after leaving ‘Tom Lake’. She tells them all, and to herself her entire past with Duke that finally settles as a deus ex machina. The bitterness of the past inhales in her though, but seeing her daughters sliding the bucket of cherries around their neck and her husband tending to the goats—the entire farm—well! It’s another love story Emily has webbed, another emotion that has transcended through past betrayals and impertinence. She lives by it gracefully as it’s better to forgo past; it’s not that it never existed but that it never validated the reason for existence.
TAKE AWAY
Sentimental; it’s like how you put the leaves and flowers together to make a bunch of true happiness!