When Father Doesn’t Know Best
For Ann Patchett, all dramas are ultimately family dramas
by Margaret Renkl
Fortunately, Patchett appears to be one of those people for whom gorgeous writing comes easily. In an anecdote in her 2005 memoir, Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, Patchett’s friend Lucy Grealy is blocked and far overdue on the deadline for a novel she’s contracted to write, and Patchett offers to write it for her. “We wouldn’t have to tell anyone,” she says. “I could write it and then you could rewrite it so that it sounded like you.” Just like that—as though writing a book were no more trouble than lending one. (Grealy never published a novel, but Patchett is widely believed to have ghostwritten the memoir her friend Renée Fleming, the soprano, published in 2004.)
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.
Still, an Ann Patchett novel is not a Kumbaya sing-along, and there are moments in this seamless narrative when her page-turning plot imperceptibly leads readers past the arresting domestic drama of the story to a quiet recognition of the larger, ongoing dramas of our nation: what it means to live with racism and poverty. Kenya’s mother counsels her against admiring anything too thoroughly: “If you stare at something people will think you mean to take it.” And when Kenya wakes up in Bernard Doyle’s house, she is amazed by the difference between her dark housing-project apartment and this dazzling bedroom, wondering if, through some trick of nature, more light falls on wealthy neighborhoods. Neither Teddy’s religion nor Doyle’s politics has addressed such inequalities in any meaningful way.
Even the patched-together community of mutual concern that is the hallmark of a Patchett novel is, here, far from perfect. The act of altruism outside the Jesse Jackson lecture, for instance, is not as selfless as it seems. And even though Doyle genuinely loves his sons, the adoption isn’t strictly generous: “Right from the beginning Doyle saw the little boys as a fresh start, a chance to do a better job. It was remarkable in retrospect, seeing as how Sullivan was at that point still more than a decade away from complete ruin.” This is a family where people remember each other’s errors, accuse each other falsely, nurse imagined rejections, look away from the proffered hand. Perhaps you know a family like that.
What makes Run so moving is that Patchett’s characters, for all their monstrous flaws, are also full of goodness, genuinely doing the best they can. They love each other, and in the end they are capable of coming together when communion is necessary. “We should have been allies,” Doyle says wistfully to Sullivan. “But we’re not,” Sullivan shoots back. And then, miraculously, they somehow find their way to a small understanding, to a new point of shared commitment. To name what unites them—to each other, to Kenya and to Tip and Teddy—would be a spoiler, but it’s classic Ann Patchett. And a worthy successor to Bel Canto.
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