Ann Patchett's lands of memory hold the action

In her latest novel, 'Tom Lake', the author reminds us of the slippery nature of memory and the wider and narrower beams used to recount family stories

- Devapriya Roy

When Ann Patchett was still a child, she took two decisions: She wanted to be a writer, and she didn't want any children. She never really changed her mind. The few times she came close to reviewing the second, arguably more controversial, decision-she confesses this in her essay There Are No Children Here (2021) she found herself at a farmhouse in the Berkshires.

As a young writer, Patchett was sometimes invited for the weekend by her editor at Houghton Mifflin, Dick Todd, and his wife, Susan. It was the early 1990s and the Todds lived in an old house that stood in the middle of a field and was impossible to warm, a place where their girls, Emily, Maisie and Nell, their dog Coco, and their many guests, had all left their imprint. "It was," Patchett writes, "the love, the house, the field, the dog, the dishwasher, the long wooden table in the kitchen, the bowl of apples, the piles and piles of books, the three girls mostly grown and gone, that made me think having children could be okay, as long as they were like the Todd children, by which I mean not around..."

Three decades later, this farmhouse (or something quite like it) has a starring role in Tom Lake, Patchett's latest novel, with the dog and the kitchen and the bedroom with the sloping roof stickered with glow-in-the-dark planets and stars, and, most vitally, featuring three girls, whose names Patchett retains: Emily, Maisie and Nell.

For all the charm and circularity of this anecdote though, it would be idle to say that Patchett has turned a memory from her youth into a novel, peopled by her Charles Lamb-inspired "dream children". Anyone familiar with Patchett's oeuvre knows that each of her books features a unique world, constructed so cleverly that one feels as though it came into being fully formed.