Tom Lake is Ann Patchett’s 2023 novel about a Michigan cherry farmer. When the pandemic denies the farm its usual workers, Lara Nelson’s grown up daughters return to help out with cherry harvesting. Lara passes the time talking about her short-lived, youthful acting career, and a love affair with an actor who went on to become famous.

Initially I have to admit to finding the novel bemusing. Lara’s account of her past, in polished prose with formal layout of dialogue, did not suggest somebody telling a story to people listening. It was a jolt to emerge from what felt like a novel, to find myself on a cherry farm, required to believe that the preceding section had been a story told while fruit picking. Did Lara have different voices for different characters, like Bernard Cribbins on Jackanory; or, in a more up to date analogy, Stephen Fry doing his thing for Audible? Even though it took a while, I did come to an accommodation with this not very believable narrative style. If the book felt artificial at times, it was very good at showing how reality and artifice tend to hang together. For example, we see good acting achieved by people not trying too hard to act, or people in real life putting on the brave face necessary for skirting over unpleasant realities.

The idea of something real and substantial co-existing with shaky illusion, leads me to what I found the most interesting aspect of Tom Lake – the idea of security. Acting and farming seem very different, one a lot of airy pretence, the other rooted down in the soil. But they are actually similar in both being highly insecure professions. An actor never knows where the next job is coming from, while a farmer is at the mercy of weather and market forces. In Tom Lake, the worlds of acting and farming are fittingly brought together when the characters make reference to Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard – a play about a lovely nineteenth century cherry orchard on the verge of being swept away by change. And yet in the twenty first century, here we are, still in a cherry orchard. We get plenty of insight into cherries as large scale agri-business, which doesn’t make the fragile orchard less lovely or enduring.

At one point, Lara’s husband, Joe muses on the worst year he can remember for the local farming community :

‘Ninety-five was the year that wiped people out. All summer long it was perfect – the perfect temperatures, the perfect amount of rain, not a single blight on any tree on any farm. The crop was huge, like nothing anyone had seen in decades, and the price went through the floor.’

The perfect year was a disaster, which means that difficult years have their own compensating security.

So shifting sands can offer solid ground. This novel, like all novels, is a concoction of pretence, but it can still offer something substantial. Despite its obvious artifice, I ended up enjoying and admiring Tom Lake. It was thematically intricate and cerebral, but also easy-going, comforting, optimistic, a reassuring book for uncertain times.

Brave New World, published in 1932, is Aldous Huxley’s famous vision of a dark, future society, where, ironically, everyone is happy and fulfilled.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first. I don’t like Aldous Huxley’s writing style. He tends to stuff his paragraphs with redundant or repeated words. Look at how many times ‘the’ is repeated on the first page. And, from many possible examples, look at this passage, describing Brave New World residents visiting a ‘savage reservation’.

…their faces inhuman with daubing of scarlet, black and ochre, two Indians came running along the path. Their black hair was braided with fox fur and red flannel. Cloaks of turkey feathers fluttered from their shoulders; huge feather diadems exploded gaudily round their heads. With every step they took came the clink and rattle of their silver bracelets, their heavy necklaces of bone and turquoise beads. They came on without a word, running quietly in their deer skin moccasins’

Seven repetitions of ‘their’ in four sentences.

Right, I’ve got that off my chest.

So, after looking at how he says things, let’s turn to what Huxley is saying. Brave New World describes a society where government control has ended family life. Human reproduction is a factory process, engineering individuals with different intelligence levels to happily fit into a hierarchy of employment. Sex is a recreational activity. Society conditions people to enjoy easy-going, promiscuous relationships, whilst rarely feeling loneliness, or unhappiness. A drug called soma, a kind of alcohol, LSD amalgam, shorn of unpleasant side effects, acts to support eternal contentment in the present moment, without past regrets, or future hopes.

Some aspects of this society made sense to me as a possible scenario. Some did not. The bits that did not mainly concerned the idea of creating individuals with different abilities. Huxley seems to see ability as a very fixed quantity, which can be decanted in greater or lesser amounts into people. This didn’t seem true to life, in the present, or future. As just a brief nod to the real complexities involved, you could think of chaotic individuals with epsilon competence, enjoying alpha-plus confidence, who reach the heights of government. Sometimes it’s not how good you are, it’s how good you think you are that counts. Ability is too diffuse a thing to conveniently measure out.

However, other aspects of the Brave New World society did have a ring of truth. Control of relationships in the interests of authority was interesting, because this has happened historically. For example, there’s the idea of romantic love, which historians suggest was largely invented, or at least idealised, in medieval Europe, as a way for the Church to subdue family power. Family dynasties might want to make politic, arranged marriages in their long term interests. Romance, tends to set young love free, to make any choice it pleases. And young love is not well known for making sober assessments in the family interest. More recently in the UK we have seen a similar process in the use of inheritance tax, particularly after World War One. Aside from contributing a relatively small amount of money to the exchequer, inheritance tax acts to prevent families handing money down generations. This marked the real ending of aristocratic power in Britain, and the final consolidation of modern state government. So, it is true that authority has manipulated family relationships for political ends, and may continue to do so.

Also interesting is the Brave New World idea of happiness in not looking forward or back. There are, indeed, many modern health and spiritual movements – based around mindfulness or meditation for example – that emphasise living in the present moment. Alternative health, aside from its useful aspects, became a surprisingly problematic area during the pandemic, a breeding ground for covid conspiracies, which could extend to a denial that the illness existed. Carried to an extreme, you can imagine the rise of cold-hearted contentment in a drug-assisted present moment, past and future ignored, with people conditioned to believe that unhappiness and illness are not real.

Overall, Brave New World is a mixed bag, in some ways perceptive about human nature, in other ways not really seeming to understand people at all. And then there’s that writing style….

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a novella by Truman Capote, published in 1958. A New York writer recalls a time living in his first apartment, setting out on his career with nothing more than a few sharpened pencils and a lot of youthful ambition. That humble apartment was special to him as a place where he could sit down and work on becoming the person he wanted to be.

The writer recounts his memories of Holly Golightly, a neighbour in the same apartment building. His efforts to create a new version of himself at his desk, mirror Holly’s much more exuberant adventures in the same direction. Holly’s uncompromising mission to be herself ironically involves pretending to be someone she’s not. Originally a country girl from Texas, Holly creates a party girl, socialite, Golightly persona, which feels more her than the Lulamae she used to be.

So we start to feel that being yourself often involves living as someone else. If you aspire to be, for example, a writer, you have to pretend to be a writer before actually becoming one. And even after making it, the initial faking tends to linger, maybe in an imposter syndrome. The ‘real’ writer often feels insecure, or a bit of a fraud, pursuing a precarious career with no sick pay or pension plans. Holly Golightly is also a fraud. Lulamea plays Holly Golightly with the kind of all-in method acting that any expensive American acting school would be proud of. But alongside this commitment, Miss Golightly remains a pretence, a fun game. Similarly, if you ever become a proper writer, labouring under deadlines and other mundane realities, Truman Capote seems to suggest that something playful and pretend should remain in your writing, helping it stay enjoyable for writer and reader. After all, a novel is a game of make-believe. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a fascinating play, about ambition, disappointment, consummation, freedom and identity.

As for the quality of writing, from age eleven Truman Capote spent hours practising writing like other children practised violin. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is beautifully written. I can’t resist quoting a quick example. Here are a few lines from the end of the book, describing a storm, which might delay Holly’s final flight out of New York:

‘The sky was red Friday night, it thundered, and Saturday, departing day, the city swayed in a squall-like downpour. Sharks might have swum through the air, though it seemed improbable that a plane could penetrate it.’

There is so much in those two sentences – direct description of a storm, indirect suggestion of the dangers Holly faces, and maybe even a hidden reassurance. According to the rhyme, a red sky at night usually means the following day will be a nice one.

Reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a delight for shepherds, party girls, writers, pharmacy staff like me who want to be writers – anyone really.