Is There Really Such a Thing as A Quiet Book?
Finished Ann Patchett’s brilliant new novel, Tom Lake, a few days ago. It’s sitting with me still—the plot, the layers, the nuance, the characters, the narrative voice, the things that mostly stay off the page and those that build line by line as she gently weaves past and present and propels her story forward. A family and their Michigan cherry orchard: three daughters, a mother and a father, and adventures and people from the past interweaving with the present as they pick and harvest cherries and pears during the height of the pandemic, which colors the story and keeps them in place, but still manages to sit in the background, almost but never fully invisible. It pays homage to Chekov’s Cherry Orchard and a larger homage to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, neither of which you have to have read, but certainly if you have, all the better, and if you haven’t, you may certainly find yourself wanting to. Tom Lake is about life and love and ambition, about mental health and family and the choices we make in life and the places those choices take us. It’s about cherry farming too, and vet training, and theater and acting, about raising daughters. I could keep listing, but I think you probably have the gist by now.
I don’t always read reviews, and much of the time I don’t read them til after I’ve read the book, because I like to go in fresh and see what I see without any pre-assumptions. Tom Lake’s reviews are wonderful of course. Ann Patchett is phenomenal; she is at the height of her craft, and the two times I’ve heard her speak in person at various conferences, she has made me cry the emotional kind of tears which result from listening to a person tell stories that ring true in such a full-hearted way that you feel every molecule in your being has been somehow heard and seen. She knows how to tell us the painful and beautiful things about being human in this very messy world.
Still, there it was in one of the more prestigious reviews – I think it was the New York Times, but honestly I don’t have time to go search because I’m trying to get this post up, so it’s possible it could have been Kirkus, but anyway – a big-time reviewer observed that Tom Lake was a quiet book, implying with the rest of the text of the review that this made it a sort of old-fashioned storytelling.
And what am I supposed to do with that? (And what is ‘old-fashioned’ anyway and why is that bad?) I had the same reaction that I always do which is to wonder what quiet—in this context— even means. No chase scene? No avante garde stylistic choices? Not enough sex? Not enough… whatever. Is it because sewing is mentioned? Or Thornton Wilder? Or cherry harvesting? Or because the interior character arcs drive the story as much as the external events? And in any case, why would anyone feel that ‘quiet’ is even a thing here? I simply don’t know.
I think about this frequently, in part because it’s a phrase that has been thrown at some of my books as well. (Please note here that I am not comparing myself in any way to the master of craft that is Ann Patchett. Trust me, I am not! Just that with any book that gets labeled quiet, including my own, I always wonder why)
The story that progresses in Tom Lake is not quiet at all. There is turmoil and longing and confusion and hopefulness and painful, aching loss. There is love in all its forms including those that are so fierce they can destroy. There is betrayal and fear and happiness and comfort. There are those darn cherries, and I love cherries, especially Michigan cherries at the height of the season. (When you grow up across the lake in Chicago, you know the delicious pleasure of those cherries!) The underpinnings of the novel may indeed work quietly, staying behind the scenes as the pandemic does, but they are doing their job to build a story that is filled with a whole bunch of NOT QUIET.
Is there a novel you love that has been reviewed as quiet? Do you find that label as meaningless as I do?
And if like me, you are the author of a ‘quiet’ book, bravo! We have our own way of shouting. You can trust me on that!
Til next week.