Some authors write books that you finish and then sit with for a while because you’re not quite ready to move on. That type of writer is Ann Patchett. Even though she has been publishing novels since 1992 and has amassed accolades, readers, and an almost evangelical fan base, it is still possible to come across someone who hasn’t read her and feel compelled, almost like a parent, to correct that right away.
When she was still in her twenties, she released her debut novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, which already displayed the emotional accuracy that would come to define her. After that, she published Taft in 1994 and The Magician’s Assistant in 1997. These novels didn’t quite gain widespread recognition, but they were subtly growing their readership. Everything changed in 2001 with the arrival of Bel Canto. The book centers on a group of captives and their captors during a hostage crisis at a vice president’s mansion in an unidentified South American nation. As the weeks turn into months, something other than captivity starts to develop among them. Every day the house is filled with the voice of an opera soprano. A businessman from Japan develops feelings for someone. Teenage guerrillas—children, really—discover that their minds are capable of learning languages they had never been taught, chess, and music. For that book, Patchett was awarded both the England Women’s Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. It was sold in numerous nations. Adjectives ran out for critics.
The way Patchett employs Gen, the translator, as a sort of structural spine is what makes Bel Canto so confusing to read. All of these people ought to be strangers if they don’t speak the same language. However, she uses the one person who speaks every language to force intimacy, demonstrating how much human connection is not really about words at all. The rest is done by the music. It’s possible that no other American novelist of that era was considering language as a character rather than merely a tool with such clarity. Even though Patchett hinted at the impending tragedy from the first page, the book ends in the only way possible.
Naturally, she didn’t stop there. Run debuted in 2007, while State of Wonder debuted in 2011. The latter novel, which reads like Conrad mixed with something much more personal and morally complex, sends a pharmacologist deep into the Amazon to discover what happened to her former colleague. The messy sprawl of blended family life over several decades was tackled in Commonwealth in 2016. It’s the kind of story that makes you care about all six or seven characters at once.
The Dutch House followed in 2019. This book might be the one that made Ann Patchett indispensable, if Bel Canto was the one that made her famous. In an attempt to make sense of what was taken from them, Cyril and Maeve, a brother and sister, repeatedly return to the opulent, glass-fronted Pennsylvania estate where they were banished as children. It has the texture of memory itself, told by Danny decades later; it is dependable in feeling but erratic in specifics, constantly molded by what we needed to be true. It was named a finalist by the Pulitzer Prize committee. It was described as devastating by readers. Tom Hanks narrated the audiobook, which seems fitting in some way—a certain American comfort and melancholy.
Published in 2023, Tom Lake represented a different kind of reach. It is set in a Michigan cherry orchard in the early months of the pandemic and centers on a mother who tells her three daughters about a summer romance she had with a man who went on to become well-known. The novel’s quietness and its insistence that a story doesn’t require catastrophe to matter have an almost radical quality. Patchett is repeatedly drawn to people who are temporarily imprisoned, whether it be in a pandemic orchard, a family estate, or a hostage situation, and what that forced intimacy reveals about our desires for one another.
Whistler, her most recent book, is set in 2026 and has what sounds like a classic Patchett plot: a woman meets her ex-stepfather at the Metropolitan Museum of Art forty-four years after they last spoke, and their relationship must be rebuilt from the ground up. It’s difficult not to wonder what she’ll do with that arrangement because Patchett has always excelled in relationships that defy easy classification and exist on the periphery of traditional family structures.
In addition to her novels, Patchett has authored four nonfiction books, such as Truth & Beauty, which is about her friendship with poet Lucy Grealy, and These Precious Days, which is a collection of essays on friendship and home that became one of the most popular books during the pandemic without ever claiming to be about it. In 2006, she served as the editor of Best American Short Stories. Two children’s books were published by her. She also started Parnassus Books in Nashville in 2011 and went on to become one of the nation’s most well-known advocates for independent bookselling, making appearances on Oprah, Colbert, and NPR. In an odd literary alliance that somehow makes perfect sense, she and James Patterson serve as ambassadors for BINC, the Book Industry Charitable Foundation.
She currently resides in Nashville with her spouse and dog. One of the most renowned novelists in American literature isn’t likely to be found there, but Patchett has never shown much interest in expectations. She writes the books she wants to write at what appears to be her own leisurely pace, and they find their readers—sometimes right away, sometimes years later—discovered by someone sitting with an unidentified grief or on a beach or airplane. The problem with her work is that. It doesn’t age in the typical manner. Even after twenty years, Bel Canto still feels like it was written for the present.
