When Father Doesn’t Know Best

If Ann Patchett were another kind of writer—a Harper Lee or a J. D. Salinger—she might have retired in 2001 after the phenomenal success of Bel Canto. Apart from the near-unanimous critical acclaim (including the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award) and its best-selling status (rare for literary fiction), there was also the simple matter of its transcendent beauty: Bel Canto is a masterpiece, and Patchett surely knew, even as she was writing it, that she was setting the bar for herself awfully high.

So it comes as no great surprise to discover that Patchett’s new novel, Run, is as graceful and as justifiably confident as anything she has written before. Run isn’t better than Bel Canto, but it arises from the same essential view of human nature, from the same preternatural understanding of the human predicament that animated Patchett’s best seller.

Bernard Doyle is a devoted father struggling to raise three sons—two of them adopted—after his wife’s death. Doyle is also the former mayor of Boston, his political aspirations destroyed when he covers up his biological son’s guilt in a local tragedy. So Doyle has transferred his ambitions to Tip and Teddy, the African American sons he adopted as babies. Though they haven’t rebelled with anything like the vituperation of their older brother, Sullivan, neither one is remotely interested in politics—Tip wants to be an ichthyologist, Teddy a priest—a fact that Doyle can’t accept: “He did not mean for any of his sons to become ichthyologists. He had meant for them, at least one of them, to be the president of the United States.”

On the night that launches the events of Run, Doyle has bullied Tip and Teddy, now in college, into attending a lecture by Jesse Jackson. It’s another doomed effort to jump-start their destiny, and in the inevitable argument that follows, Tip walks away. Distracted, he steps off a curb and into the path of an SUV. A woman leaving the lecture hall throws herself against him, knocking him out of the way and taking the hit herself. In the 24 hours that follow, the Doyle family—including the prodigal Sullivan, who chooses this night to arrive, unannounced, from his self-imposed exile in Africa—becomes inextricably linked to the woman who saves Tip, and to her daughter Kenya, an 11-year-old who falls into their care because she has nowhere else to go with her mother in the hospital.

Like all Patchett’s novels, Run is about what happens when people who have no inherent connection to each other, but ample cause for misunderstanding and distrust, are tossed together in difficult circumstances and told to get along. The circumstances themselves vary astoundingly from book to book. In The Patron Saint of Liars, a runaway California wife lands in a Kentucky home for unwed mothers; in Taft, a black Beale Street bar manager hires a white waitress and acquires her teenage brother’s troubles, too; in The Magician’s Assistant, a young woman spends 20 years in love with a gay magician; and in Bel Canto, terrorists storm a South American dinner party, taking hostage all the international guests and forcing them to invent a kind of emotional Esperanto. Despite variations in plot and setting, the conflict is always the same: the way human beings learn to find common ground on constantly shifting soil.