We’re All in the Race: Ann Patchett’s Run

Any book that leads me to recognize my biases and expectations is valuable to me, and Ann Patchett’ s Run  is one of those. A rare book, too, given the topics she deals with. She constructs a small mixed family whose members’ status and interactions raise questions on complex issues, particularly race, heritage, legacy, duty, honor, and love.  She does so while engaging the reader in a family’s plight over an injured person and her child.  It’s a book of many small mysteries and connections that create a very contemporary, important story, and could lead to a personal revelation as well. It’s a bold, beautifully crafted book.

Patchett prepares the reader for the work’s complexity by underlaying the present circumstances with a family legend.  A statue of Bernadette, an early ancestor, has for four generations been passed to the female descendant who bears the closest resemblance—fair, redheaded, rather ethereal, in pose and expression like the virgin Mary.  The legend contains the truth—a lie about who the statue represented and its origin. The dominant legacy, though, is that the similarity of surface features entitles one descendant to the statue and all it represents.  The family now in possession of the statue includes no mother—she died years ago—no daughter, but three sons, one white and two black, both adopted.  Who most closely represents the statue and thus will inherit it? The story that follows eradicates wonderfully the surface identity of characters and brings the reader into each character’s nature, never predictable by skin color. Actually, not predictable at all.  And there lies the beauty and the power of this book.  Some readers may be surprised at the difference between what they expect and what they find.  

Though the beginning of present time is a bit slow, an unexpected event occurs that snaps the story into action and focuses sharply on family and divisions within it.  While walking to a party to meet with Jesse Jackson, one of the brothers is saved from a wayward vehicle by a black woman who thrusts him out of danger and is herself injured.  She is accompanied by a young girl.  Why would she save him? Are they related? The ensuing hours will reveal who she is, why she and her daughter were nearby. And, increasingly important, how injured she is. Will she live? Priorities change as they must and should. The more long-term conflicts and estrangements become clear, too. 

There’s so much inviting speculation that artifice seems heavier than story, but that’s only for a very brief while and possibly just my own take.  Prominent politicians are mentioned, squarly placing the family on the Democratic side. The sons seem to represent religion, politics, and science.  Names are clues.  The young girl is Kenya and her mother is Tennessee.  These and many more engaging hooks are not adequate to what the characters truly represent and how individual they become. They work wonderfully as little mysteries that, being followed, provide more important details. Who is the mother? Which child belongs to whom? Who was the father? Does it matter which child was adopted first?  What was the original name? Are the characters who love Shubert related? Patchett can turn a view around, which encourages looking at the other side, and then questioning that, too. Sullivan quotes to Teddy part of a Martin Luther King’s speech but then remarks that “the white brother part doesn’t work exactly.  It should be our black brothers. ‘We have sometimes given our black brothers the feeling that we like the way we were being treated.’”  But Teddy, who is the artist at remembering speeches, thinks that if the next paragraph had been remembered his own “entire enterprise would have been sunk.” The passage has personal and positive meaning between the two men, and our immediate understanding is not the final one.  Some of the signs are misleading, and our speculation about them is telling. This small community is our larger one, the view made palatable, not strongly emotional or even dramatic. Rather low and gentle. 

Central is that the people love each other. They try to work together for one common goal. Sullivan and his father, Doyle, try to find one thing they can agree upon, because they are divided in many ways.  They agree on Kenya, the young girl, on helping her.  Of course. They agree on a person, not a cause.  The cause is the unity and the unity is helping.  How wonderful.  The whole work suggests this. A similar suggestion is to be courteous and kind by pretending to feel if you can’t feel.  That brings to mind the old adage (I forget the source, which may be Shakespeare, Aristotle, or some other wise person) to pretend a virtue if you have it not.  In pretending, you may develop the virtue. Maybe you just need the opportunity.  The pretense can always be dropped.  One son does this, adopts a career as a duty, and relinquishes it when he feels the duty has been met.  There’s no rule about such responsibility in Patchett’s work.  It’s one of the possibilities for an individual. One of life’s vicissitudes.   

Patchett expands the concept of mothering and disallows harsh judgment against women who give up their children. A woman can relinquish a child because of great love for the child or for another person.  Most of the biological mothers here are missing, which of course matters to the child, as we learn through Tip’s later thoughts. But the absence in Patchett’s view is never abandonment, neither emotional nor physical. Love is the cause. And mothering is a genderless activity, a choice, an experience.  It is nurturing and caring.  As is fathering.  Many characters here are mothering, including the twelve-year old Kenya, who wishes only briefly not to have the role.  Perhaps the greatest is Sullivan.  He is named after a priest and family member. He furthers the cause of protecting, evident as a dominant admirable trait of any person, male or female. Sullivan has the physical traits of his mother and, though his father thinks Sullivan doesn’t have any of his mother Bernadette’s traits, he definitely does.  Sullivan loves children and knows how to love them, to comfort them.  That’s his calling.

No character is left knowable only through surface details.  In Patchett’s graceful, precise prose their thoughts and feeling reveal each more fully, different from outsider’s perception.  This occurs with every character, but more strikingly, and possibly the most difficult for Patchett to achieve, with the two characters named Tennessee.  The injured woman, Tennessee, hallucinates with (or truly talks with) her deceased friend. Thoughts and feelings are clearly separate, except when, briefly, they’re not.  It’s an extreme example of the fluidity among characters and issues that makes the book profound and beautiful. While the shifting point of view in this passage answers questions that might otherwise go unanswered, it doesn’t seem an artifice as much as it does the realistic mental and emotional journey of the injured mother in remembering her friend.  Only she could share this. The depth of individual emotion warms the passage and raises it above artifice.

Without giving away any details, let me say the ending is a positive and comforting view.

What rich and intricate messages this story contains. A mixture we are.  Yes. And all of us heirs to a human nature and human rights, despite surface details. The original question, about who gets the statue, is answered.  It’s a mild reward compared to all the answers Patchett has presented about the true nature of family, which includes all of us as individuals, flawed, but deeply concerned about life and desires and deeply loving someone, and paying some cost to serve others. All valuable.