To appreciate the silken agility with which Ann Patchett constructs her fiction, consider the way the opening sequence in her new novel, Run, invokes the Virgin Mary. On the book's first page Patchett reveals that one of her story's central characters, Bernadette Doyle, died two weeks earlier. Now Bernadette's sisters have arrived to grapple with a family tradition.
A statue of the Virgin, adorned in blue robe and halo, portable enough to be placed on a bedroom dresser, has been passed down from generation to generation in this family. It has an unusual history. The Italian sculptor who created it used the delicate beauty of Bernadette's great-grandmother as part of his inspiration. Through the generations there has been an enduring resemblance between the iconic, red-haired image and the family's real women.
Tradition dictates that the statue be handed down to a worthy relative. But Bernadette spoiled the pattern. She had no daughters, only sons. The oldest, Sullivan, has the statue's hair color but none of its virtue, as he is the family ne'er-do-well. The younger two boys look even less like the statue, because they are black. But Bernard Doyle, Bernadette's husband, overrules his sisters-in-law by insisting that his younger sons are entitled to the precious family artifact, appearances notwithstanding.
One thing that makes this political maneuvering so intriguing is that it is political. (Bernard Doyle is a former mayor of Boston, well-schooled in the art of bending others to his will.) Another is the lovely ease with which Patchett shifts her characters through time.
In the first few pages of Run, without apparent effort, she glides through time. She glimpses Bernadette as a bride, telling her husband the history of the statue, and then Bernadette as a mother who eagerly adopts two more sons when Sullivan is 12. A visit to the pediatrician, who notices a lump on Bernadette's neck, swirls the chapter back to its starting point. She is gone, survived by one holy statue and a household full of men, as united by nurture as they are different in nature.
No stranger could glance at the Doyles and figure out what they have to do with one another. This author specializes in delving beneath the surface of such incongruity. As she did in the beautiful Bel Canto, Patchett once again thrives on juxtaposing wildly different characters and creating volatile chemistry among them. (Nothing so exotic is liable to happen in the workaday fiction of Ann Packer, with whom Ann Patchett should not be confused.) At the same time she creates an entirely credible set of dynamics for the Doyle family.
Then, long after Bernadette's death, the Doyle men are quite literally shaken by a new arrival. In the midst of a Massachusetts snowstorm, a Chevy Tahoe plows into Tip, the more scholarly and cold-blooded of the adopted brothers. He might have been killed without the intervention of a black woman, an apparent stranger named Tennessee Moser, who shoves him out of harm's way and is then badly hurt herself.
The woman is hospitalized, and that leaves her 11-year-old daughter, Kenya, with nowhere to go. When the Doyles take charge of the girl, they begin to suspect that Kenya was secretly part of their family all along.
In place of the shock and sibling rivalries that might be expected in such a story, Patchett provides room for contemplation. She dispenses with her material's least interesting prospects by making the Doyles deeply devoted to one another in ways that make racial divisions meaningless, and by making Kenya, Tip and Tip's genetic brother, Teddy, exemplary and accomplished people. Although Bernard Doyle was accused of political opportunism at the time he adopted Tip and Teddy, he has proven to be the most devoted of fathers, despite the usual pangs of fatherly frustration.
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