Wed. Sept. 26

 Ann Patchett – who came to fame with her post-9/11 book “Bel Canto” – spends the time in her new book, “Run,” in Boston and its environs. It concerns a retired white mayor, his two adopted black children, a “coincidental” car accident that involves the birth mother … and much more.  It’s about race, brotherhood, death, family, adoption. Mostly. We asked Patchett what she saw as the central theme?
“For me,” she said from her Nashville home, “the main theme - just for me, it doesn’t seem to be for anybody else - is politics and social responsibility. If you are smart and talented and have very advantage, is it enough you get to go off and do what you want to with your life? Do you have some responsibility still to pay back? Doyle (the mayor, father) and Tennessee (the birth mother) do. The children (Tip, Teddy and Sullivan) don’t have any sense of that at all: Everything has come to them. (As to) adoption, people want to take on the burdens they choose – and there’s the responsibility of juxtaposing Teddy and Tip, who are very wanted and loved and waited for and Kenya (the daughter of Tennessee, who is severely hurt in a car accident.) It comes out of my weariness of notion of family values. Our families must extend past people who have our DNA and past people we really like and choose. They’re community values, national values, human values.”
     Local readers will recognize the terrain. A January blizzard in Beantown. (She was going to set it in Paterson and Princeton. But she’d never been there. “It seemed like a great juxtaposition of so much wealth and poverty, and then I thought wouldn’t it be easier to write that book set in a place I know?”) Patchett - who speaks Wednesday Sept. 26 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre at 6 p.m. ($5) – lived in Cambridge for a year 13 years ago doing a Radcliffe fellowship and frequently visits friends.

   As she embarks on this book tour – Boston is her first stop – Patchett is asked how she approaches the stage? Is she an entertainer? : I usually read, talk, do a q and a. I can do standup if I have a mic and a stage. It tends to get a little funny. The two things I’m not afraid of in life are flying and public speaking. I can do them well. But I don’t like to hear people read for long stretches of time, so 15 minutes is about as long as I read. I talk about how I got to the book, funny things along the way, the writing life. I’ve been doing several different ‘Bel Canto’ talks for years, and just gave the last one.
I don’t have my ‘Run’ patter down yet.”
    Patchett knows best-selling books and quality books seldom go hand in hand. She knows there was a stroke of luck involved with “Bel Canto” – it sold 25,000 hardcover and over a million in paperback. She knows other authors likely harbor the same illogical resentment she used to have for, say, Tama Janowitz. She knows there’s a perceived line between “commercial fiction” and “literary fiction,” and laughs about how some of her earlier fans wouldn’t read “Bel Canto,” because obviously she’d crossed over to the commercial realm … simply by selling books. “It’s always open season on whoever sells books and gets prizes,” she says.
     As she embarks upon her author tour, Patchett says, “Part of going on the road is figuring it out. A good book or song leaves enough room for people to bring their own baggage in, set up camp and make a life inside the book.

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