Run by Ann Patchett Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Run
Book Review: Easily Ann Patchett's Best
Summary: 5 Stars
Bernadette Sullivan was a beautiful red head when she married Bernard Doyle, a Boston politician destined to become mayor. She brought a hand carved statute of the Madonna into the marriage that had been passed down from mother to daughter in her family. It was supposed to go to her daughter, but her first born was a son, named Sullivan. Years later she and her husband adopted two black children who they treated like their own. When she died, she left her husband to raise the children and had no daughter to give the statue to.
Doyle wants his children to follow him into politics, however his eldest is involved in an accident that forces his father from office. Sullivan leaves the country, leaving Doyle with the two adopted children, Tip and Teddy (both named for famous Boston politicians). Tip yearns for the priesthood, like his uncle, and Teddy becomes an ichthyologist, preferring to study his fish in his Harvard lab, rather than enter the rough and tumble world his father desires for him.
It's snowing in Boston when Sullivan, the prodigal, returns from Africa. Doyle, who has dragged his children to many political speeches throughout their upbringing has taken them to see Jesse Jackson at Harvard. Tip inadvertently backs into the path of an oncoming car and Tennessee Moser, an elderly black lady, jumps from the crowd, pushes Tip to safety and is struck by the vehicle. She'd been attending the speech with her eleven-year-old daughter, Kenya.
Tennessee is Tip and Teddy's birth mother and she'd been following the boy's progress as they grew up, dragging Kenya along with her when she'd spy on them. Kenya tells the Doyle family this and they take her in while they wait for news from the hospital about her mother. And there you have the beginning of this tightly woven novel that kept me entranced throughout. I loved Bel Canto, thought Ms. Patchett could never top it. She has.
Kenya, an eleven-year-old speedster on the track, is a character who will steal your heart away. I found a bit of my father in the ex-mayor and maybe a bit of the old guy in Father Sullivan as well. The boys, Tip and Teddy seemed as real to me as flesh and blood, but of them all, I loved Sullivan, the black sheep, the best. And who does the Madonna go to? Well that's the heart of the book, don'tcha know.
Book Review: Excellent Read
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a riveting book that couldn't put down. Wonderful eclectic group of personalities to exploreBook Review: Fairy Tales in Boston
Summary: 2 Stars
In one of the reviews written to sell this book, someone mentions fairy tales, but fail to mention that this book more closely resembles fairy tales than literary fiction. All the characters encountered in this book are warm, intelligent, articulate people with nothing but good intentions. The boys who grow up having lost their mother(s) twice and are forced to deal with being black kids raised by a well-to-do white politician have no complaints really, except whether they feel pressured to become doctors and lawyers. Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins? Oh, the choices!
African American culture isn't even brought into the book, unless you count parts of speeches by Jesse Jackson and MLK. Oh, and we can't forget the mention of the projects, albeit the nicer than typical projects. Unfortunately, it seems like race is brought into the book only as an attempt to make the book more politically charged and to sell more copies. Either that or it was a topic a comfortable writer had really wanted to write about but did not want to challenge herself with the investment and real work required to make this seem genuine, touching, or anything beyond technically proficient. I hope she has not become so comfortable with her success that her name can sell her books though had she been anyone else, her stories would not have.
Book Review: Family Stories
Summary: 5 Stars
Ann Patchett is a wondrous writer, capable of small miracles of grace that come seemingly from nowhere, illuminating her characters and bringing joy to the reader. Even though RUN, her latest novel, may have flaws, how can I give it less than five stars for the joy it gave me throughout? The joy that kept me reading from one magic moment to the next. The joy, even more, that would make me put the book aside, the better to savor the anticipation of what might lie ahead.
As she had done in her first novel, THE PATRON SAINT OF LIARS, Patchett begins with a prologue that is half miracle, half folklore. This concerns a rosewood statue of the Virgin Mary that has been in the family for generations, passed down from mother to daughter. Two stories are told about its origin, the first romantically heartwarming, the second more realistic and largely contradicting the facts of the first, but satisfying on an even deeper level. This prologue does two things. It sets up the basic family unit: a young mother recently dead, leaving a son of her own (Sullivan) and two younger boys (Tip and Teddy, African-American, adopted), to be brought up by the widower, a former mayor of Boston named Doyle. It also demonstrates the power of storytelling, to reveal things in one light and then to illuminate them from the other side, making them seem entirely different. The whole book will be about families and their stories, the stresses that pull families apart, and the miracles that knit them together again in unexpected ways.
Flash forward a dozen years. Despite Doyle's hope to steer his adopted sons into politics (look at their names), Tip is becoming a marine biologist and Teddy is considering the priesthood, following the example of a beloved uncle, Father Sullivan; the other Sullivan, the eldest brother, has become estranged and now lives in Africa. An accident in the snow at night after a lecture by Jesse Jackson brings two other people into their lives: an unwed mother named Tennessee, and her eleven-year-old daughter Kenya, both black. The main action of the book will follow these seven characters for the next twenty-four hours. If Patchett were writing an opera, almost all her scenes would be duets; she has a way of bringing her characters together in different combinations, and to reveal something new about them each time. Essentially, this is the same structure as in her celebrated BEL CANTO; none of the scenes here, though, are love duets in the conventional sense, but all are suffused with love in other ways, and this is perhaps the greatest miracle of all.
It is hard to illustrate this without giving the plot away, but perhaps I can quote from one of the few solo scenes in the book, where the old priest Father Sullivan contemplates his death. "He had started to wonder if there was in fact no afterlife at all . . . How wrongheaded it seemed now to think that the thrill of heartbeat and breath was just a stepping stone to something greater. What could be greater than the armchair, the window, the snow? Life itself had been holy. We had been brought forth from nothing to see the face of God and in his life Father Sullivan has seen it miraculously for eighty-eight years . . . This was not the workings of disbelief. It was instead a final, joyful realization of all he had been given."
RUN is right up there with all but one of Patchett's previous books, although its African-American characters and theme of parenthood brings it closest to TAFT. But some readers looking for a repeat of her masterly BEL CANTO, its immediate predecessor, may well be disappointed. The brushstrokes -- that texture of close personal interactions -- are exactly the same, but the canvas here is smaller. The hostage situation in BEL CANTO allowed Patchett to set small scenes within a large political context; she has remarked that she thinks of RUN as a political novel too, with Doyle a kind of Joe Kennedy, but really her essential focus is on the human level. I also have to say that the climactic scene in RUN does not have quite the same cogency of those that lead up to it, and not all the loose ends are tied up; but to be honest, I recall being disappointed by the ending of BEL CANTO too. Nonetheless, my discovery of Ann Patchett's work five years ago almost single-handedly restored my delight in reading, and I rejoice that even in a slightly imperfect book she can still bring such pleasure now.
Book Review: Family, There is No Greater Bond
Summary: 5 Stars
In RUN, Ann Patchett writes about one day in the life of two African American brothers, Tip and Teddy, who were raised by Boston's white mayor, Bernard Doyle. It's also a story about their biological mother Tennessee Moser, who had given them up for adoption and about Doyle's older son Sullivan and Moser's young daughter Kenya.
Doyle drags his sons to see Jesse Jackson speak at Harvard on a snowy night, Tip steps in front of a speeding car, Tennessee jumps from a crowd of bystanders, pushes Tip out of the way, but is hit by the car. Eleven-year-old Kenya tells the Doyles who Tennessee really is and the Doyles take the child home with them and thus begins a day of discovery for them all in this heart warming story of family loyalty that is packed with characters who will be with you long after you finish the story.