This is the latest book chosen by my book club for us to read. I’ve not read any other books by this author but this one sounds interesting with it being about ‘the lives parents lead before their children are born’, and I’m therefore imagining it might be a cosy and heartwarming family tale, which sounds just perfect reading to me!
This is the latest book chosen by my book club for us to read. I’ve not read any other books by this author but this one sounds interesting with it being about ‘the lives parents lead before their children are born’, and I’m therefore imagining it might be a cosy and heartwarming family tale, which sounds just perfect reading to me!
The main character (name not yet provided) is helping out with a friend at auditions for a play called Our Town, greeting and organising the actors as they try-out for the various parts. She and her friend are both high-school girls and they chat about books and their hoped-for career paths during quiet moments of the audition. The main character is persuaded to audition for the part of Emily as there isn’t a suitable actress to play this part. Hmmm, I already like the focus on books with the main character wanting to be an English teacher and to teach books like David Copperfield and as I love Charles Dickens’ books so I’m already liking this girl! I’m also interested in her and her friend’s choice of books to read during quiet periods of the auditions, Doctor Zhivago being the main character’s choice, and Firestarter by Stephen King being her friend’s choice, and I actually have Doctor Zhivago on my bookshelf waiting to be read, and I’ve not read many of Stephen King’s books so perhaps I’ll try Firestarter. I’m a bit surprised that we don’t know the main character/narrator’s name yet though! It feels a bit rude to be just calling her ‘she’ and ‘the main character’ (!) and to already be forming opinions on someone I don’t yet know the name of! I wonder why the author hasn’t introduced her? Anyway, she seems an empathetic person with her feeling sorry for the auditioners struggling on stage, though perhaps a little indecisive with her jumping from one career option to another (although perhaps this is just because she is still young and has many interests that she’d like to pursue). In fact, if I’m honest, I’m struggling a little with this book already as I’m feeling unsure about who’s who as no-one has been introduced to us, and also it wasn’t stated at the beginning that this audition was just a memory of the main character’s, I thought we (the readers) were joining her there as it was happening but now it’s become apparent that the main character is actually a mother of three 20-something daughters and she’s telling them the story of her life, I guess I just query why this wasn’t made obvious at the start rather than us seeming to join mid-story to her daughters while it not being apparent that it was a story to her daughters! And I am puzzled about this Peter Duke that the daughters seem so keen to hear about, who is he, is he their father who is there at the farm with them all, or is this father at the farm actually their stepfather and Peter Duke is their father but no longer in their lives?! I find myself wondering if anyone would actually tell a story in this way? I guess in real life you would tell it in this way because your audience knows who you are and at what stage you are at in your life and who the people are you’re speaking about, so really I guess the author is being authentic telling it in this way (!), and it makes me realise that other books with a narrator telling a story who gives all the background detail isn’t actually reflecting accurately how people would tell a story, so I guess I have to be impressed at the author doing it in this realistic and unique style and her challenging the norms of storywriting, but (and I feel a bit petty here!) I am craving the ‘normal’ style of writing which provides the background details! But I very much like the neatness of it being a story within a story.
The narrator is called Lara Kenison (born Laura but she has altered her name) and she is telling the story of her earlier life as an actress in LA to her three daughters, this is during the time of the pandemic which is why her grown-up daughters are at home. The family lives on a cherry farm, and Lara tells her story over several days while they all pick cherries. Emily (one of the daughters) also discusses with her mother and sisters the fact that she and her boyfriend Benny (who is the son of the farmholders on the neighbouring plot) are planning to get married during the pandemic. Lara’s daughters are particularly intrigued that their mother used to date a famous actor called Peter Duke, who is the star of some of their favourite films. In her story of her earlier life in LA acting in the play Our Town, Lara made friends with a dancer called Pallace, and Peter’s brother Sebastian also arrived so the four of them spent time together as two couples (Lara and Peter being together, and Sebastian and Pallace being together), though Lara says that Peter could act crazily at times. They all visited the director’s cherry farm. Hmmm, I’m quite sad that Lara has given up her aim of being an English teacher in order to be an actress. And again, I’m getting confused due to the lack of background detail! For example, it has only just become apparent that the book is set during the pandemic (as it was stated that Lara was sewing face masks) but I wonder why this wasn’t stated at the beginning, it does seem an unusual style of writing. And I’m getting confused with Lara’s daughter Emily, and the character of Emily that Lara played as an actress. I am interested in whether Lara named her daughter after the character of Emily that she played and if so then is this significant in some way, but it’s confusing when Lara speaks about ‘Emily’ and I’m not sure which Emily it is! I also find it confusing when Lara speaks of the other actors/characters in the play as her relatives, such as her referring to Peter as her father, this really made me do a double-take with us knowing she was in a romantic relationship with Peter (all kinds of wrong there!) so I wish she’d say ‘the character Emily’s father’ instead of ‘my father’ which would make more sense and reduce my alarm, tee hee! And more information just casually dropped in rather than stated clearly, is that the director of the play is now Lara’s husband Joe and the father of her daughters, and the cherry tree farm belonging to Joe (the director at the time) is the farm they now all live at! I am struggling not to be slightly annoyed at the lack of explanations as I find it throws me off to have something suddenly revealed and I’m then flicking back through the book with my newly gained knowledge to see instances of this character again and re-read their passages with the new information I now have about them. And I know this sounds crazy (!) but I kind of feel like the author isn’t playing fair and I can’t fully trust her, tee hee, as I am spending time getting to know these characters and then having what I thought I knew all become undone, and it also (again, I know this sounds crazy!) makes me think that I can’t fully trust the narrator Lara as I can’t rely on the information she gives about characters and situations as I know there will likely be some other crucial information included later which will alter my earlier assumptions. However, I am still fascinated by the unusual style of this book and why the author chose to keep things concealed like this, and I imagine it must have been challenging to write it in this way, almost like writing a murder mystery book where the author has to be constantly aware of what they are concealing and what they are revealing (which makes me hope that the author might write a murder mystery book, as I think she’d do a wonderful job!). And I am beginning to realise Our Town may be a real play, I’ll have to google it, I’d never heard of it before so I’d just presumed it was a made-up play for this book. And if it is a real play, I wonder if I’d perhaps follow this book better if I knew the characters and the plot of the play, as the play is clearly a very important part of Lara’s life. I’m also wondering what kind of direction this book is going to take, is there going to be a big reveal that Lara’s first-born daughter was actually fathered by Peter (as the daughter seems to wonder herself) and then we realise how wonderful her husband has been in accepting and raising the child as his own?
In the story that Lara is telling, she snapped her Achilles so was in a cast and couldn’t walk and therefore couldn’t act, so her understudy Pallace took over the role. Peter and Pallace began a relationship, cheating on Lara and Sebastian, and Sebastian punched his brother Peter when he discovered this. Lara decided then that she was finished with acting and debated about having a sewing career (as she worked in her grandmother’s sewing shop when she was young, and when she was recovering after the operation on her ankle she helped the wardrobe department repair the cast’s clothes), or to be a teacher as she used to dream of being. Awww, I’m pleased that Pallace got the role when Lara was injured, as it sounds like she was often the understudy but rarely the star. And hmmm, Lara tells her daughters that she never saw Sebastian again after he hit Peter but then she has a private thought (which is shared with the reader but not her daughters) which is, ‘Sebastian. This is an uncomfortable point on which I have meant to be evasive, but since I have lied I decide to let the lie stand. I have staked out a single day of privacy in the light of this merciless interrogation’, so does this mean something happened between her and Sebastian, that she perhaps saw him again and this was the ‘single day of privacy’ and they were perhaps intimate together, is that why she has concealed this from her daughters? I’m very very intrigued!
Lara continues with her story, saying that Peter turned up at the farm when she was pregnant with Joe’s third child, and Peter took little Emily in his arms. Lara then remembers privately, not sharing this with her daughters, that before she met Joe again and married him and moved to his farm, Peter phoned asking her to visit him in a kind of hospital. She agreed to this and they had sex in the bathroom, which seemed to be the reason why he wanted her to visit. When she left the hospital, Sebastian was waiting outside as there could only be one visitor at a time. She later realised she was pregnant and had an abortion. Lara ends the story by saying that Peter later drowned, and Sebastian arrived at the farm following Peter’s instructions and paid Joe’s parents a large sum of money for Peter to be buried in the cemetery at the farm as he so much enjoyed the day he spent there with Pallace and Lara and Sebastian. Omg, I was completely confused with this skipping around in time, why is the scene in the hospital (which happened before the scene with Peter arriving at the farm) not told first as it happened first, as surely this incident at the hospital had an effect on how Lara viewed Peter when he arrived at the farm as he wasn’t particularly nice to her at the hospital and it resulted in her becoming pregnant with his child which presumably he didn’t know about, so I struggle to imagine how Lara would have greeted him when he arrived at the farm and it would have been interesting to have read that scene knowing the previous information and admiring how coolly she handled that difficult situation. I know Lara didn’t tell her daughters about seeing Peter at the hospital and only told them about seeing Peter at the farm, but she told the reader about both so I can’t understand why the reader wasn’t told both incidents in the correct order. Again, I just feel like there is such concealment going on with this book which leaves me feeling unsettled and like I can’t trust Lara at all, that she’s an unreliable narrator. And I have so many questions about the hospital scene itself! Firstly, what kind of a hospital was this as it seemed more of a mental institution, so had Peter actually been sectioned for his own safety? And why on earth did Lara agree to go and see Peter after he’d hurt her so much by cheating on her? Or did she hope he was going to apologise and perhaps say that she was the only one for him, would she have valued and wanted that from him? And then why why why did she have sex with him, and to do it so carelessly without protection too! I can understand she was probably shocked and upset to see him in what seemed to be a mental institution and she felt sorry for him, but I still really struggle to believe she would act like that, in fact I don’t want to be cynical but I was even left with a tiny niggling little thought about if the author had wanted to introduce the slight mystery of who Emily’s father was so therefore needed Lara to have sex with Peter in order to make this mystery possible so she slightly stretched the realms of possibility of what the character would really do. Though then again, due to the style of this book with things being concealed, I’m aware that I probably don’t actually know Lara’s character as well as I thought I did and my judgements about what she would and wouldn’t do may not be as accurate as I think, so perhaps this would indeed be something she would be likely to do. I’m also wondering why Peter asked Lara to visit him instead of any of the other women he’d had relationships with, and I’m left with the uncharitable thought that perhaps Lara was the only one he thought likely enough to let him have sex with her. Then (just to add to the mysteries and confusion, tee hee!) what happened (if anything) between Lara and Sebastian outside the hospital? Lara refers to being grateful that Sebastian and herself didn’t make a difficult situation more difficult when they were outside the hospital, and she makes this reference again when she realised she was pregnant, so I think (?!) she’s saying that she and Sebastian could have had sex outside the hospital but didn’t so therefore they didn’t make a difficult situation more difficult, and then I’m thinking her second reference to not making a situation more difficult when she realised she was pregnant meant that she therefore knew the child was Peter’s, there was no possibility of it being Sebastian’s, and that makes me then wonder further if she’s meaning that if the child had been Sebastian’s then she would have kept the child. But maybe I’m wrong on all this, I’m not 100% certain that she didn’t have sex with Sebastian, given that odd comment earlier about their single day of privacy. And I’m even not 100% certain that she had an abortion (never mind whose child it might have been), I think it is implied that she did but I’m kind of feeling now that I can’t rely on my assumptions and I can’t rely on what Lara seems to be implying, which (again!) I find unsettling, although (again) it makes me admire the unusual writing style of the author. But is it just me, I am being completely dense and missing things that are obvious and feeling confused when there is no need and inventing things that aren’t there? Is the book supposed to be this mysterious, especially after I had imagined it would be a cosy and heartwarming family tale? Perhaps I’m trying to be a detective when there is no need to be one! I’m just not grasping the author’s intention with this book, which again could be extremely clever writing on her part and she meant for the book to appear on the surface as a cosy heartwarming tale but it actually has far far deeper themes. And another query I had was why Joe felt alarmed when he saw Peter holding little Emily at the farm, I thought at first this could be because he thought/knew that Emily was Peter’s child and was worried that Peter would realise this and demand to be part of Emily’s life, but that doesn’t appear to be the case as Lara didn’t keep Peter’s child (I’m guessing!), and even if she didn’t have an abortion then surely the age of Emily would be wrong for her to be Peter’s child (?), and presumably (though can I presume anything?!) she didn’t see Peter again before he died so Emily can’t have been conceived by them later? So perhaps Joe’s alarm was just seeing Peter there at the farm knowing how Lara used to feel about him, or perhaps it was also seeing his precious daughter in the arms of a man he suspected to be unstable and spontaneous and thoughtless and unreliable so therefore he was concerned that Peter might hurt Emily. And then there’s Peter dying, did he kill himself? And I’m presuming that Peter’s death was what prompted Lara’s daughters to ask their mum to tell them the story of her life with Peter, but (again!) I think I’d have preferred to have this reason (Peter’s death), which is really the catalyst of the whole book, stated at the start of Lara’s storytelling.
Well, I continue to be intrigued by this book after I’ve finished it, and I’m impressed at how such a seemingly simple book on the surface is actually very complex and has made me think lots about it and puzzle lots about it! I’m still wondering about the unusual style of concealing things and then revealing them later, and why the author chose to write it in this way, was to jolt the reader out of their assumptions about this being just a simple cosy book (in which case she has certainly done that!), or was it to experiment with the conventions of this type of genre? And as I said before, it must have taken enormous effort to write in this style, so I am impressed at the cleverness of it as well as the uniqueness of it. I have also been puzzling how I would describe the book to others, is it the story of how an actress and her director married and drastically altered their lives and successful careers and became the owners of a cherry farm and raised a family and who are keen to see the legacy of the farm live on with one of their daughters? Or is it about being trapped at home during a pandemic and losing all the routines and interactions with the outer world and becoming insular and how then the comfort and support and closeness that family and family stories can provide during a difficult time like that becomes very powerful and important? Or is it a mystery story with lots of puzzles about who Lara had sex with and who the father of her first-born actually was, so it’s a novel about secrets kept for decades even within a loving family? The book has certainly surprised me and I’m sure it will be one I continue to think about for quite some time.
I will certainly read other books by this author, and I see she’s written The Dutch House which sounds family-based again (like Tom Lake) and very intriguing, and These Precious Days which seems to be about Patchett’s own life and sounds fascinating. I’m also very tempted to re-read Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (with Lara wanting to teach this novel to her students if she was to have been a teacher). And I have Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago on my shelf waiting to be read (I remember this was Lara’s choice of book to pass the time at the audition) so I will definitely pick that book up. I’ve also had a look at the details of Stephen King’s Firestarter (which Lara’s friend was reading at the audition) and it sounds very dramatic and gripping, so I’m tempted to read that as well. And I’d love to read the book of the play Our Town by Thornton Wilder as I wonder if perhaps the lives of those characters may mirror to some extent the lives of the characters in Patchett’s book and that may give me some clues to some of the things which still puzzle me (well, I can hope!). And oooh, I’ve just spotted that the audio book of Tom Lake is read by Meryl Streep, so I’m tempted to also listen to that!
