Once in a blue moon I encounter a book that resonates so deeply with me that I immediately flip back to page one and start over. That happened when I finished Run by Ann Patchett. The first time I read for plot and the second time for language. Months later, I’m still going back to re-read favorite passages.
Run is about family, running, and secrets.
Everyone is in the book is running from or toward something. Bernard Doyle ran for office. As the former mayor of Boston, he’s trying to push his younger sons into politics. His eldest son Sullivan is running from a shameful past. During a blinding snowstorm, the Doyle family collides with a stranger and her child. The child (and my favorite character) is a born runner (literally) who yearns to play the piano as much as she hungers to know the Doyles. Her secret connection to them unwinds in a twenty-four hour storm. Poverty and privilege collide. But I don’t want to give anything away.
Passion for classical music runs throughout. Former Boston mayor Bernard Doyle loves Franz Schubert. He’ll play a record of the “Trout” quintet for anyone who will sit and listen. The child, an eleven year-old girl named Kenya Moser with a habit of pulling on her braids, adores the piano. But having grown up in poverty, the only instruments she’s known are shabby uprights, out of tune and broken. That changes when she meets the wealthy Doyles. When they take her home, she sits down at a grand piano for the very first time,
and could have cried to see such perfect keys, every single one of them, none sitting higher or lower than the others, none of them yellowed or split. The white gleamed white and the black gleamed black. She wanted to press her cheek against them, to absorb their coolness. She wanted to sound E-flat with her forehead. ‘It’s beautiful.’
The piano serves as a metaphor for a possible future for the Doyles, and on a wider scope, for the country as a whole. Ann Patchett imagines a diverse and complicated world where goodness wins.
It’s beautiful.
(Run was published in 2007 by Harper Collins Publishers. Ann Patchett has a new book out, by the way. Listen to this interview with her on the Diane Rehm show.)
