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Tom Lake is the story of the Nelson/Kenison family sheltering in their cherry orchard during the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, but it’s also a book which holds five plays, multiple timelines, and several intersecting romances within its bounds. It explores the interplay of taking on moral and ethical responsibility, editorializing memory, and making choices as a parent,, particularly focusing on the protagonist Lara Nelson, her husband Joe Nelson, and Lara’s youthful love interest, the famous actor Peter Duke.
The lives of these three characters carry the common thread of time spent working on the play Our Town, which recurs as a motif throughout. Our Town is a real play by Thornton Wilder. As it tells the story of a small New Hampshire community, Our Town reflects on the importance of everyday, ordinary moments and warns its audience about the price one pays for regret. Having played the main role of Emily in this play three times, these ideas resonate with Lara whenever she pauses to think about her life. Scenes which echo moments from the play also reappear in Lara’s adult life, particularly as she shares her memories with her daughters. The play’s setting in small-town New Hampshire parallels Lara’s rural life there and later in Michigan. Because Lara is the novel’s narrator, it’s unclear whether Lara just thinks of her life through the lens of Our Town or if the two stories really are similar. Lara’s version of events is the only one the reader is permitted to access, which colors the story at every turn.
Read about the play Our Town as a motif in Tom Lake.
Both Our Town the play and Tom Lake the novel depict characters who are confronted with the inevitable consequences of their decisions. They recognize the extent of their choices’ impact only in hindsight, especially in the case of Lara’s guilt over what happens to Peter Duke. Lara and Duke actually meet when acting in a summer stock production of Our Town. When Lara and Duke first speak, he is not yet famous; he’s just a very talented young actor with whom Lara has a summer fling. Lara, fresh off the set of her first feature film and waiting for its release, moves to Michigan to act in the production and quickly falls head-over-heels in love with Duke. At the start of the novel this vague, romantic beginning is all that Lara’s daughters know about Duke’s relationship with their mother; they have no idea how it might relate to his addiction or to his death. Lara, however, begins the novel feeling horribly guilty about the way Duke’s life spiraled out of control. As the story progresses and she’s forced to confront her past over again, she is able to come to terms with her choices and their consequences.
Read an in-depth character analysis of Lara Nelson.
Relatedly, the coronavirus pandemic has forced Lara, Joe, and their daughters into an isolation where there isn’t much to do other than ruminate on the past. Like many other novels set during 2020, Tom Lake also suggests that loneliness and feeling cut off from the world can cause people to behave in unusual ways. It’s only because of their unique circumstances that Lara agrees to tell the girls the Peter Duke story, keen to capitalize on having all her daughters under one roof. The pandemic’s forced pause gives Lara’s daughters the opportunity to engage with their mother’s past in a way they likely wouldn’t have otherwise, and their isolation becomes a narrative catalyst for Lara to reveal details about her romance with Peter Duke. While they remain isolated from the present-day world, Lara brings them into the past over the course of several days. The coronavirus prowling at the gates also makes the reader highly aware of the novel’s meditations on vulnerability. The ever-present threat of illness creates a sense of urgency, making everyone in the Nelson house want to feel known and understood while there is still time. The stillness and lack of outside company allows Lara to reevaluate her life and the decisions that brought her to this point. She’s able to feel the significance of the choice she made to build a life with Joe, rather than accepting it as a given. The pandemic also makes weak spots in the family’s relationships more obvious, as the reader can see when Lara’s pride is hurt by her daughters leaving her out of discussions.
Read more about the symbolism of the Covid 19 Pandemic in Tom Lake.
As she tells the story of her time with Duke to her daughters, Lara intentionally leaves out or edits things to make them more palatable, and to protect herself from emotional fallout. In Tom Lake, when something happens because of one character, it’s also bound to happen to that character. For example, Lara’s grandmother Nell doesn't tell Lara that she's suffering from end-stage cancer until it’s too late to save her. As soon as Lara realizes that Nell is dying, she springs into action to get her medical care, but at that point, there's nothing that can be done. Lara also only finds out about Nell’s brother Brian, who died many years ago, as Nell is dying herself. These things were hidden from Lara with the intention of protecting her from pain, but the deception has had the opposite effect . Despite these two concurrent tragedies and the pain that the missing information caused her, Lara still leaves information out of her own history when she tells her daughters about her time with Duke. Even though Lara’s own life story also contains a serious medical procedure, Lara keeps that secret to herself for fear of hurting her daughters. Like her grandmother Nell, she only passes on the information she feels her girls must know in order to act. As she and her daughters harvest cherries together, Lara is also ‘cherry-picking’ the events that she wants her family to remember her story about Duke by. Lara knowingly participates in her own cycle of passing on partial truth, shouldering the responsibility for the true sum total of her life’s difficulties all on her own.
Read more about Cherries as a symbol in the novel.
Tom Lake implies that the major reason for Lara’s troubles and Duke’s decline was his refusal to confront the emotional voids in his life. Even with a successful career and a partner who loved him, he couldn’t resist the lure of attention and excess. Instead of dealing with his grief for his sister, he self-medicates with drugs and alcohol even when he reaches the pinnacle of his acting career. His downward spiral reveals how addiction to external gratification can erode personal well-being and relationships, no matter how charismatic the addict is. Lara’s path diverges from Duke’s fundamentally, and she wants her daughters and her husband to understand that this is her choice. She chooses security over excitement, picking Joe and the farm over the uncertainty of an acting career. This central choice—which Lara continues to assert that she is satisfied with, as if to convince herself—ties into the novel’s broader theme of the cyclical nature of life. Emotional patterns echo across generations in this book. Lara’s passionate, unstable relationship with Duke is juxtaposed with the steadier, more grounded marriage she builds with Joe, even though her time with Duke ended well before she and Joe got together. Duke’s journey reveals the dangers of pursuing fame and validation at the expense of actual relationships, while Lara’s path suggests that there’s quiet joy to be found in lasting partnership. The whirlwind glamour of celebrity loses its shine when compared to real love’s most ordinary moments; picking cherries, telling stories, coming together over grief, and sharing hope for the uncertain future.
