Ann Patchett’s writing career started out with a long, slow burn-out at Seventeen magazine, where she spent nine years, and had 80% of her submissions rejected. She’s come a long way since then. Her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars from 1992, was made into a motion picture, and her breakthrough book Bel Canto was given the PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2002.

Now with her fifth novel, Run, Patchett reinforces her position as one of our leading fiction writers. Here she explores the fall-out from an unexpected encounter between two young African-American brothers, raised as the adopted sons of the white mayor of Boston, and their biological mother, who appears suddenly on a cold winter evening and saves one of the siblings from an oncoming car.

The car accident sets off a series of events, as unsettling as they are unexpected. The boys’ mother, Tennessee Moser, is seriously injured and hospitalized. Her daughter, Kenya, is left to fend for herself, and is forced to seek shelter under the same roof as the brothers she has long known but never really met. Meanwhile, their adopted father, Bernard Doyle, is shaken by these strong new family ties that threaten to disrupt his own relationship with his sons.

Years earlier, a different car accident had put an end to Doyle’s political ambitions. Another son, Sullivan, had been involved in a crash that took the life of a young woman, and the resulting cover-up led to a mini-scandal. In the midst of this new upheaval, Sullivan returns home after years overseas, and he too is drawn into the emotional cauldron of events that echo his personal tragedy.

Patchett is exceptional at unlocking the nuances of how ordinary people respond to an unexpected crisis. In Bel Canto, she masterfully explored a terrorist hostage situation, but did so in intimate, personal terms that even imparted a sense of charm to the unsavory proceedings. In that work, she artfully developed some two dozen characters, and showed how their attitudes and psyches were transformed over a period of weeks.

Article Author: Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia is a writer and musician. He is the author of Delta Blues, The History of Jazz and, most recently, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool.

Visit Ted Gioia's author page — Ted Gioia's Blog