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Executive
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2007
Book Reviews |
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Run
by Ann Patchett |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Family Ann Patchett’s fifth novel, Run,
explores from a variety of dimensions what it means to be family. With deft
skill, Patchett presents the Doyle family: family Bernard, his late wife,
Bernadette, their son, Sullivan, and their adopted sons Tip and Teddy. An
uncle is a priest. Set in Boston, the action accelerates with a car accident,
when Tip and Teddy’s mother, whom they did not know, pushed Tip out of the
path of a car, and gets injured herself. Tip and Teddy learn that she is
their birth mother, and they meet their teenage sister Kenya. From one
chapter to another, Patchett introduces the issues that draw families
together and drive them apart. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 2,
pp. 17-19: In the basement of the Museum of
Comparative Zoology, Tip stood alone with the fishes. Threats
of bad weather that had not yet materialized sent everyone else home early,
and while he was quietly fond of the people he worked with there was always
something thrilling about having the place to himself. He walked through the
catacombs of dead fishes, filing back the jars that had been taken out for
study that day. Over the dull thrum of fluorescent lights overhead, Tip kept
listening for the sound of his brother coming down the hallway. All he heard
were his own feet on the cement floor, the squeal of tennis shoes and the
musical clink of the glass jars touching in his basket. Teddy was late, a
fact so basic and essential to his nature that Tip could hardly believe he
had ever expected it could be otherwise. His brother was late. The sun would
come up in the East. One would think he could remember that. "Just meet me
and Da at the lecture," he had said on the phone that morning,
thinking then at least one of them would be on time. "But I'll be at
the museum by five and the lecture doesn't start until seven." Teddy had
sounded perfectly logical. "I'll just sit at your desk and study while
you work." A
two hour margin of error, even Teddy could manage that. But now it was six
forty-five. If Tip left this very minute he'd barely be on time himself, and
he couldn't do that anyway because then Teddy would have walked all the way
to the museum just to find a note taped to the door saying he'd left. Teddy
had lost his last four cell phones and had not pursued a fifth, so there was
no way to head him off. It wasn't that Tip minded being late exactly. He
didn't have the slightest interest in hearing what Jesse Jackson had to say.
It was only the knowledge that their father would already be in the auditorium
by now looking at his watch that made Tip feel uncomfortable about the time.
How much better the night would have been if the sky had thrown down the bank
of snow that was predicted and locked him in with the fishes. He took a jar
containing eight small warmouths from his basket and put them back on the
shelf where they belonged. There were six rooms in the Department of
Ichthyology, which was located beneath the museum, six brick-walled cells in
the subterranean hive, each one a maze of metal shelving, fishes stacked
floor to ceiling like bins of nails in a hardware store, 1.3 million dead fishes
suspended in alcohol. A dozen or more tiny fish clustered together in small
jars, single fish folded over in larger jars, huge fish alone in metal boxes.
There were fish that had been recently discovered in the Amazon and a fish
dating back as far as the 1700s.
Put
a jar in the wrong spot and you can pretty much say goodbye to it altogether.
Tip followed the numbers with a librarian's precision, setting his basket on
the floor so that he could handle the jar more carefully when he returned it
to its proper location. Tip Doyle had a position of importance in the lab,
even if his father didn't see it that way. Historically, the recataloguing
of fishes was work for graduate students. That this job had come to Tip, a
senior, was a sign of his seriousness and demonstrated his sense of
responsibility. "Does
the country need another ichthyologist?" his father would have said had he
been following Tip through his rounds. Tip was looking for the empty spot to
which the next jar, eleven small bluegills, should be returned. "Would the
country lay down its foreign wars, its need for health care and education, in
order to turn its collective gaze to the splendors of the cod?" Tip
stopped for a moment, using the buzz of the lights to work the voice out of
his head. His father liked to say he paid more than forty thousand dollars a
year to one of the finest universities in the world to give his son the right
to peer into glass jars at dead fish. While Jesse Jackson's son went to
Congress, his own son had wandered into the stacks of the Mayr Library, never
to be heard from again. Every jar Tip
replaced introduced him to a group of specimens he had never seen before.
Whenever he put a fish back he stopped to pick up three or four of its neighbors
and contemplate their connections, and inevitably those connections led him
to other fish, which might lead him to someday making a real scientific
discovery of his
own. The
warmouth, for example, was in a bin next to some nearly translucent banded
pygmy sunfish. Normally, had there been more time, that would have been
enough to make him put the bluegill down on the floor and lift
up all the sunfish. Once he got going, Tip could often manage to shoot through
half a night, finally turning the lights out behind him and locking up
with his own key. Patchett’s
skilled writing saves Run
from becoming a soap opera. Instead, we get complete characters in whom we
develop deep interest. By the last page, we’ve come to know them well, and
wish that they were members of our family, which in many ways, they are. Steve
Hopkins, October 25, 2007 |
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Go to Executive
Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the November
2007 issue
of Executive Times URL for this review: ttp://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Run.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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