Ratings12
Average rating3.8
It's a winter evening in Boston and the temperature has drastically dropped as a blizzard approaches the city. On this fateful night, Bernard Doyle plans to meet his two adopted sons, Tip the older, and more serious and Teddy, the affectionate dreamer, at a Harvard auditorium to hear a speech given by Jesse Jackson. Doyle, an Irish Catholic and former Boston mayor, has done his best to keep his two sons interested in politics, from the day he and his now deceased wife became their parents, through their childhoods, and now in their lives as college students. Though the two boys are African-American, the bonds of the family's love have never been tested. But as the snow begins to falls, an accident triggers into motion a series of events that will forever change their lives.
This is at its very center, a novel about what truly defines family and the lengths we will go to protect our children. As she did in her bestselling novel Bel Canto, Patchett beautifully weaves together seemingly disparate lives to show how intimately humans can connect. Stunning and powerful, Run is sure to engage any Patchett fan and bring her even more admirers.
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The almost melodious writing style of Ann Patchett is, of course, this book's best feature. And, as I am coming to understand is typical Patchett, the story before the story truly brought me in: a stolen Virgin Mary statue, a question of what it means to be family, rife with sibling rivalry, single parenting and trans-racial adoption. That was a story that was full of potential.
And I really liked huge chunks of Run, but most of it felt just like that – palpable potential resting underneath: the woman who claimed to be the birth mother, and was she or was she just a groupie and the creepy, loving way she stalked her biologic sons. The saintly, dying Catholic priest uncle, and the did he or didn't he actually have the power to heal the sick. The forgotten mayor of Boston, fading into obscurity, trying to live by proxy through his sons. The prodigal son, returned home, a murderer and a thief, but possibly a modern Robin Hood, with a heart of gold and a knack for saving children. The problem is that by shifting around between all of these stories, none of them were really ever given an opportunity to come into their own.
The ending came too quickly and, as I'm also beginning to realize is typical Patchett, with a completely unnecessary time jump that left way too much unexplored. I would read the heck out of a story about an ichthyologist turned doctor turned ichthyologist (goodness knows I'm one quarter-life crisis away from writing an autobiography about the topic) and Patchett played with a lot of interesting concepts about why people go into medicine in specific, and careers as a chance of penance in general, but it A) had nothing to do with the first 300 pages and B) she didn't exactly do the topic justice in the 10 pages she had to deal with it. It added little to the book.
I'm giving Ann Patchett's fiction one more chance before I resign myself to the idea that it was truly Lucy Grealy who made Truth & Beauty come alive.
A widowed white Irish American father and his two black adopted sons are at a Jesse Jackson event in Boston when they are involved in an accident. Another person involved in the accident, seemingly an unrelated bystander, turns out to be much more connected to their family than they initially thought. On top of that, the ne'er do well estranged older son (not adopted) chooses that night to reappear at home. Family drama ensues.
This is family drama, but it is very polite, well behaved drama. Characters disagree with each other vehemently, but there is no yelling, banishing/disowning each other, or even cursing. Still, the characters are interesting people and the story is compelling. The title, "Run," refers both to the sport and running for office, with a pleasant bit of ambiguity, since the widowed father is a former Mayor of Boston and would like one or both of his adopted sons to become President of the United States. My one complaint about this book is that it becomes hard to believe the eleven year old girl is really only eleven as the story advances.
I like how she presents and handles a moral dilemma in all her books. Wonderful thought provoking story.
A group of people somehow end up involved with each other and manage to change each other's lives in unexpected ways.