Run
By Ann Patchett
HarperCollins, 295 pages, $25.95
There’s the hint of the otherworldly in Ann Patchett books — acts of magic and strokes of high coincidence that tease, seduce, enthrall. In “The Magician’s Assistant,” a man has to die for a family to heal. In “Bel Canto,” terrorists coexist with artists and diplomats during a strangely magical, drawn-out siege. Even in “Truth and Beauty,” Patchett’s memoir of friendship with the brilliant, disfigured Lucy Grealy, which won a 2004 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, there are gestures so extreme and incidents so uncommon that readers are left hovering between disbelief and wonder.
“Run,” which I believe is Patchett’s finest work, has its share of the bewitching: a Catholic priest whose hands may be agents of healing; a conversation (or is it a dream?) between an anesthetized patient and her long-dead best friend; and collisions of the bodily and happenstance kind.
And yet there is something magnificently calm about “Run” — something seamless, songlike and whole. It didn’t really matter to me whether plausibility could be pinned to every plot turn. What I cared about — what Patchett made me care about — was the well-being of the patchwork family she has placed on center stage. She made me love her characters just as much as she surely loves them herself.
“Run” is dazzling from the start; it wastes no time getting revved up. Somehow combining economy with soul, Patchett opens her book with a beguiling story about a family treasure, a “Mother of God” statue that had been passed down, daughter to daughter, in an Irish Catholic family. In the Doyle family, the statue belonged to Bernadette, who bore one son and adopted two others with Bernard Doyle before her untimely death. With no daughter in the family, the fate of the statue seems uncertain. But after a family tiff and a priestly intervention, the statue remains with the Doyles — a presence, a touchstone, a beckoning force.
The story then moves to present time, when Sullivan, the troubled, natural-born son, is already in his 30s, and the two adopted boys — who happen to be black brothers — are busy defining their own futures. As the smartest and most serious brother, Tip, a college senior, is pursuing an education in ichthyology and spends dreamy hours in Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Teddy, the sweet one, the compassionate one, can often be found at an old-age home with his great uncle, Father John Sullivan, protecting the retired priest from the incursions of folks who believe he has the healing touch. None of the boys has fulfilled his father’s hope that they enter politics, though still the father, a former mayor, drags his youngest sons to political lectures with the hope of igniting that fire.
Indeed, as the second chapter begins, the boys are grudgingly on their way to meet Doyle at a Jesse Jackson lecture. A big Boston snowstorm has blown in, and by the time the lecture lets out, the world has been remade white: curbs have disappeared, familiar pathways are gone. Desperate to swear off all future political lectures, desperate to assert his freedom from the tyranny of his loving father’s impossible expectations, Tip steps off a curb into the path of a car. From out of a seeming nowhere a stranger appears. With blind force she shoves Tip out of mortal danger, taking the blow of the car herself. The stranger is black, and she has a daughter named Kenya.
The entirety of “Run” takes places over the next 24 hours, as Tip, Teddy and Bernard make surprising discoveries about the web of their family, as Sullivan returns from yet another sullen absence, as Father Sullivan is called upon for at least one more act of possible healing, and as Kenya, an 11-year old with an Olympic-size talent for speed, discovers what it is like to live in a world of privilege. Wise well beyond her years, Kenya spends the terrifying evening of her mother’s surgery in the Doyle home. She wakes to a room of unprecedented light:
“When Kenya opened her eyes it was to a flood of astonishing sunlight. So bright was this room, so radiant, that for the first few moments she was awake she did not consider mother or the Doyles at all. . . . She could do nothing but take in the light. It had never occurred to her before that all places she had slept in her life had been dark, that her own apartment had never seen a minute of this kind of sun. Even in the middle of the day, every corner hung tight to its shadows and spread dimness over the ceiling and walls. Draw the curtains back as far as they could possibly go and still the light seemed to skim just in front of the window without ever falling inside.” It is the gentleness of this passage that I find so transfixing — the way Patchettt chooses an unexpected detail, the quality of light, to suggest the great divide between those who have and those who do not. Whether writing about fish or family traditions or faith or dying, Patchett, in “Run,” goes deep in the right directions, never taking the story off its track but never glossing things either, for the sake of lyricism.
Patchett’s symmetries work. Her allusions do. The book is full of great lines about, for example, “true believers who wanted only to live . . . clinging onto this life like a squirrel scrambling up the icy pitch of a roof,” or sleep being “like a bean [Father Sullivan] managed to balance for a moment on his nose,” or a fish born with the misfortune of having “a bright red flag hanging beneath the gut like a bloody lure.”
“Run” is a mature work, a book that feels effortlessly wrought. It is also an affirming book, and Lord knows, we could use a few more of those.
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Beth Kephart is the author of six books, including, most recently, “Undercover,” her first novel for young adults.
