Tom Lake

In the novel, the story Lara tells about her past as an actress revolves around a summer stock performance of a specific play: Our Town, the Pulitzer Prize–winning drama written by Thornton Wilder in 1938. Since its first performance, Our Town has become a classic of American theater. The play is set in Grover’s Corners, a fictional town in New Hampshire, between the years 1901 and 1913. A notable feature of the play is its minimalist style—it was written to be performed with very little scenery or props, encouraging the audience to populate the stage with their imaginations.

Some of the play’s ideas influenced those of Tom Lake. Like the novel, the play focuses on a young couple, Emily and George, who fall in love and are happily married until nine years later, Emily dies giving birth to her second child. After her funeral, Emily joins the other dead inhabitants of the town, who are able to observe, but not engage with, their loved ones. She comes to the painful realization that those who are still alive do not appreciate their lives. The play’s themes of missed potential and diverging life paths are reflected in Tom Lake’s comparison between two young couples: Lara’s brief romance with Duke and her successful marriage to Joe; the short subplot of her pregnancy and abortion also gestures at an alternative not taken.

Our Town’s structure is somewhat unusual, featuring a narrator called the Stage Manager, an important character who for the most part is removed from the action in Grover’s Corners. Instead, he directly addresses the audience and functions as a guide to the play’s action. Although he is never identified as such, the Stage Manager’s omniscience, as well as his ability to break the fourth wall, has led some to interpret him as a God figure. Because Tom Lake is structured as a story within a story, it too contains a narrator character: the Lara of the present, who narrates what happened to her one summer in the past. Like Our Town’s Stage Manager, Lara has a lot of influence over how the story is told—she has the freedom to omit details such as the abortion, and the ability to shape how her story is interpreted.