As their names indicate, Tip and Teddy were raised to be Massachusetts politicians and fulfill their father's dreams. But Tip is an aloof Harvard ichthyologist, "the kind of kid who could hang from your neck and still maintain a critical distance," and he is impatient with the family ambitions. Teddy contemplates becoming a priest like his 88-year-old Uncle Sullivan, who is said to be a miraculous healer.
The other Sullivan, Tip and Teddy's older brother, is the son who destroyed his father's career. He has spent years lying low in Africa but reappears suddenly on the night of the accident to somehow, uncannily, become the Doyle who understands Kenya and her mother best.
Run, with a title that suggests many things (including Kenya's athletic prowess and Doyle's political drive), and with a watery looking cover that reflects the whole book's aura of a human aquarium, becomes an elegant melange of family ties. Patchett gives her readers much to contemplate when genetics, privilege, opportunity and nurture come into play. And to her credit she is neither vague nor reductive about any of these things; she creates a genuinely rich landscape of human possibility. If she does not wildly exploit the drama of colliding fates on a snowy night and subsequent life-or-death medical crisis, there are plenty of other writers who tell such stories.
Run is muted only insofar as its characters are all so accomplished, their natures so decent and their barbs so civilized. It's as if the story's racial nuances, which are rendered almost nonexistent, are still present enough to preclude any rough edges.
Patchett showed no such restraint in Bel Canto, a more astonishing book and a less inhibited one. But Run still shimmers with its author's rarefied eloquence, and with the deep resonance of her insights. When Kenya arrives at the Doyle home, a place she has looked at with longing all her life, and is given one of the boys' white T-shirts to sleep in, Patchett invokes the image of a ship's sail. That's an exquisitely simple image of how much Kenya's life has changed overnight.
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