Review: Ann Patchett's 'Run'

Run
by Ann Patchett
Harper, $25.95

Ann Patchett’s last novel, 2001’s Bel Canto, became a bestseller and a book club favorite by virtue of Patchett’s remarkable ability to vividly draw an enormous cast of characters -- teenage Latin American terrorists, a Japanese electronics magnate, an American opera diva -- in just a few deft strokes. So convincing are her portraits of this varied ensemble that the novel stays afloat long after its premise -- a months-long hostage standoff in an unnamed Latin American country -- should have collapsed.

In Patchett’s new novel, Run, she narrows her cast to a single complicated American family, and so it’s a shame that for all their carefully accreted detail, few of the characters ever come to life on the page. Instead, they feel like fictional constructions, players in a plot too dependent by far on coincidence and bad luck.

Run tells the story of Bernard Doyle, a former mayor of Boston, and his three grown sons: academic Tip and dreamy Teddy, black brothers adopted early in childhood by the Doyles, and their older brother Sullivan, Bernard’s biological child, who may be white but is the family’s black sheep.

On a snowy winter’s night the family takes in a young girl, Kenya, after her mother is injured in an accident. If this were a different kind of book, it would spoil the plot to reveal that Kenya’s mother is also Tip’s and Teddy’s biological mother, but Run is so constrained in its purview -- it takes place over a mere 24 hours in a snow-globe version of Boston, populated by few characters who aren’t fortuitously crucial to the plot -- that most intelligent readers won’t be surprised by this twist. Indeed, this is Run’s greatest flaw: like figures in a snow globe, its characters are stuck under glass, more trapped by the machinations of Patchett’s plot than the characters of Bel Canto were by gun-toting terrorists.

That plot smacks of melodrama, replete with uncovered scandal, revelations of parentage, a tragic death, and even a long dream sequence starring a ghost whose description as “the wisest twenty-five-year-old that God had ever created” doesn’t mask that she’s a device meant mostly to graft one extra limb on an already crowded family tree. With all these twists and turns inflicted upon a mere six characters over the course of a single day, the novel begins to have the feel of a soap opera, albeit an extremely sensitively told one.

Late in the novel, Sullivan bemoans that he returned to home after a long sojourn in Africa just in time for a brand new family drama to unwind. “He tried to imagine how interesting this story would have been had he not been a part of it,” if someone simply told him the tale a few months from now, Patchett writes. “He didn’t think the entire story could possibly take more than ten minutes start to finish, and yet to live it, to actually be a part of its playing out, was an excruciating investment of time.” Run isn’t excruciating by any means, but it can be exhausting, despite Patchett’s smooth narrative voice and her treatment of Kenya, who is bright and serious and feels like a real pre-teen girl. If only Patchett had had the vision to smash her perfect snow globe of a novel and see what shook loose.