RUN
Ann Patchett
HarperCollins
Fiction
ISBN-10: 0061340634
ISBN-13: 9780061340635

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Detective stories and sonnets, Persian miniatures and minuets. There is something enthralling to me about forms that impose specific limits. What blooms within these walled gardens may actually feel bigger and more intense than works that have whole acres to play with.

This is the case with RUN, whose span is only a single day (although the first chapter provides some necessary back story and the last tells what happens four-and-a-half years later) and whose characters are all associated in one way or another with the Doyles, an Irish-American family in Boston: the father, a widower and former mayor; one ne'er-do-well son, Sullivan; two high-achieving adopted sons, Tip and Teddy, who happen to be African American; and the boys' great uncle, a priest who may or may not have healing powers. There is also a mother ("Tennessee like the state") and her 11-year-old daughter, Kenya ("like the country"), whose exact relation to the Doyles I mustn't reveal for fear of ruining one of the novel's several surprises.

The collision of different sensibilities within the temporal equivalent of a locked room reminded me a bit of Ann Patchett's earlier fiction. In BEL CANTO, a disparate group is held hostage by terrorists in an unnamed South American country; a home for unwed mothers brings strangers together into a quasi-family in THE PATRON SAINT OF LIARS. The web of accidental connections forms a microcosm, a small world reflecting all the contradictions and linkages of the larger one --- hardly an original device, but there is nothing mechanical about the way Patchett applies it. She has placed the thorns of race and class at the sensitive heart of her book, and the result is painful but not without hope, a humanism so pure and clear that it made me want to stand up and cheer.

Or cry. Or hold my breath. There is tremendous, wrenching tension in Patchett's premise. As RUN begins, Tip is pushed out of the way of an oncoming car by Kenya's mother. This simple act of selflessness sends Tennessee to the hospital with serious injuries while her daughter tumbles without warning, ALICE IN WONDERLAND-style, into the Doyles' lives. As Kenya slowly feels out her relationship to the family --- especially Tip and Teddy --- we see her observing, with curiosity rather than rancor, that a sameness of skin color doesn't mean a sameness of circumstances.

After spending the night in the Doyles' house, Kenya can "do nothing but take in the light. It had never occurred to her before that all the places she had slept in her life had been dark, that her own apartment had never seen a minute of this kind of sun.… She wondered if there wasn't some way that light was divided and somehow…more of it wound up in better neighborhoods." Yet she and her mother live in a housing project only three blocks away from this luminously clean, noiseless, sunny paradise. And although Kenya is mysteriously and instinctively able to connect with Tip over his passion for studying fish (there is a riveting scene in Harvard's hushed subterranean ichthyology department), she doesn't know who Henry Thoreau is and has never been taken, like more privileged children, to visit Walden Pond. She is "unable to shake off the feeling that it had all been a test and that she had failed."

This innocent outsider --- loyal, eager to please, fearful of making a mistake, full of heartbreaking self-possession and dignity --- is the crux of the book; she and her mother become a sort of crucible for the Doyles, testing and transforming the family. Kenya is a character so palpable, down to her carefully parted hair and six ponytails, that she seems on the verge of bursting out of the pages. Her talent, it turns out, is for running (hence the book's title); when Tip takes her to Harvard's indoor track, she virtually explodes: "Anger and sadness and a sense of injustice that was bigger than any one thing that had happened stoked an enormous fire in her chest and that fire kept her heart vibrant and hot and alive, a beautiful, infallible machine."

RUN is all about people trying to outstrip their destiny. The elder Doyle and Tennessee, both single parents, seem determined to make their kids into moral paragons and future leaders, thinking to protect them from racism and powerlessness. They invest considerable passion in politics (giving the word run a different significance) --- which, Patchett makes clear, has the ability to corrupt (a scandal in Sullivan's past is hushed up by his father) as well as to inspire (in a flashback, after hearing Dr. King speak, Tennessee, stunned, realizes that "[t]here were some people who had the ability to tell other people what was worth wanting, could tell them in a way that was so powerful that the people who heard them suddenly had their eyes opened to what had been withheld from them all along").

But Patchett also seems to be saying that rational attempts to control your destiny will take you only so far. I don't mean that she comes across as mystical, despite some spooky moments (a ghostly encounter between Tennessee and a friend from the past); the faith she expresses is secular rather than conventionally religious --- something more like fate, karma, or providence, which turns accident into intention and bad luck into a blessing of sorts.

A book this good --- and I mean decent, not just skillfully written --- doesn't come along every day. Forgive the pun, but run, don't walk, to get your hands on a copy.

    --- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

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