Tom Lake

During my conference trip to Guangzhou, I was reading the novel Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, who wrote the entire book on a treadmill desk during the pandemic. She literally walked the whole book: a novel set partly in a lake in New Hampshire, and about a family stuck on an cherry orchard with no idea how much longer they would have to stay amid the virus. My conference hotel at Huangpu District happens to be right next to a pleasant water reservoir. That’s an idyllic location to read Tom Lake.

For some reason, I found something similar to the plot in another novel I had just finished. That’s Station Eleven, a novel recommended in my daughter’s school weekly bulletin. In both novels, I read about actors’ tragic death onstage. One had heart attack during performance, and another died after vomiting blood from drinking too much vodka and whiskey. 

The more I thought about the two novels, the more similarity I could find. Ann Patchett told a story of lockdown, during which a going-to-be-couple were happy to get perfect excuse not to invite anyone for their wedding. The story of Station Eleven, written before the coronavirus pandemic, happened to be about an unprecedented flu outbreak. You might have wondered how an author could write a story so close to how we encountered the coronavirus. 

“Listen. Even if I could book you on a flight out of Malaysia, are you seriously telling me you’d want to spend twelve hours breathing recirculated air with two hundred other people in an airplane cabin at this point?” How familiar such extract from Station Eleven seems now, almost like a prophecy that comes true.