Run

Ann Patchett was born in Los Angeles in 1963 and moved to Nashville, Tennessee, at age six; she still lives in Nashville today. Patchett attended Sarah Lawrence College for her bachelor of arts degree, and she first began publishing her fiction during this time. She then attended the University of Iowa for her master’s degree. From early on in her career, Patchett’s writing has been celebrated and awarded, winning her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994.

The story of Run originally came to Patchett in a dream she had while working on her fourth novel, Bel Canto (2001). In an interview with Jonathan Burnham, Patchett says that, for her, Run is about politics: “a father who is trying to raise one of his three sons to greatness” (“A Conversation with Ann Patchett,” frontmatter in Run. Harper: New York, 2007, pp. 4-10, 5). However, the novel is also about family, she asserts, particularly how family values should be considered in relation to one’s country and local community, not only in relation to one’s blood relatives. This led Patchett to set Run in the city of Boston, Massachusetts. She chose this setting, firstly, for its familiarity to her, but she also selected Boston because it was “on the cusp of the very wealthy and the very poor” (5). Run’s characters reflect this cusp, as the city’s sharp geographical divides between rich and poor have weakened their abilities to see others as part of a larger, communal family structure. Importantly, a significant portion of the novel unfolds in the home of Harvard University: Cambridge, the wealthiest borough of Boston. Harvard’s associations with wealth and education define this Boston area community; however, as Patchett shows, those same lines also divide the area.

Patchett has referred to Run as “Joe Kennedy—meets—The Brothers Karamazov” (5). The Brothers Karamazov is an 1880 novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky’s story initially focuses on three estranged, adult brothers’ fraught relationships with their despicable father; one of the brothers murders him for withholding a maternal inheritance to which the brother believes that they are entitled. In contrast with Dostoyevsky’s villainous patriarch, Fyodor Karamazov, Joe Kennedy was the patriarch of East Boston’s Kennedy family during the early 20th century; he was also very involved in the political careers of his sons. Patchett’s Run blends Dostoyevsky’s themes of moral responsibility and faith with the Kennedy family’s local fame, resulting in a political novel for the 21st century. Unlike the Kennedy family, the Doyle clan is “run on a matriarchal line, and […] the true power that is handed down from generation to generation comes not from the father but from the mother” (7). Run, like Patchett’s other novels (e.g., Bel Canto, Taft, The Patron Saint of Liars), features a diverse group of characters whom fate throws together, resulting in the formation of unexpected bonds among them. In Run, the Doyle family’s growing relationships with Kenya Moser enable them to experience their lives more profoundly and with a renewed sense of purpose. Unlike Joe Kennedy, Bernard Doyle is not involved with Teddy’s political career at the end of the novel; however, like Dostoyevsky’s Karamazovs, the Doyle family’s future finally appears to hold promises of hope and goodness.