Ann Patchett knows this is going to sound odd, but it's true, so here goes: About seven or eight years ago, in the middle of working on what would become her breakout 2001 novel Bel Canto, she awoke suddenly at two o'clock in the morning, shook her husband from sleep, and told him she'd just spoken to God.
"I dreamed that God came to me and said He wanted to save the world again, and this time he was gonna adopt a kid - to prove that anybody could do it if they were well raised," said Patchett the other morning over breakfast at a midtown hotel. She was flying home to Nashville in a few hours, and was dressed for travelling, in black jeans and a casual sweater. "He said, 'In fact, I'm gonna get two kids, and whichever one turns out the best, I'll use that one.' And I said, Wouldn't it be so awful for the kid who didn't get picked? And God said to me: He's still God's son. I mean, even if he's not the saviour of the world, it's still a good spot!' "
If it sounds like the slam-dunk premise of a good new book (not to say a new Good Book), it took Patchett years of start-and-stop work before she found a suitable translation of the dream: There was something odd about writing about God.
Eventually, in what became her exhilarating new novel, Run, set in Boston, she dropped the actual deity and substituted a John F. Kennedy-style politician, which in Boston is pretty much the same thing.
The God, if you will, of Run is Richard Doyle, a former Boston mayor, who has three sons: the wandering Sullivan, born of his late wife Bernadette; and Tip and Teddy, black men granted Kennedy clan names when they were adopted as young boys into the white Doyle family. One snow-blind winter's evening, during an argument with his father, Tip absentmindedly steps off a curb and is narrowly saved by a woman who darts into the street and body-checks him out of the way of an oncoming SUV. His saviour winds up in hospital and her 10-year-old daughter, having no other place to go, takes refuge with the Doyles, setting in motion a tumultuous 24 hours.
In that sense, Run echoes her other novels, from The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), which centred on a pregnant woman who leaves her husband to live in a home for unwed mothers; to The Magician's Assistant, about a woman who discovers the mother and sister of her partner after his death; to Bel Canto, which threw together South American terrorists and a group of hostages in a mansion for a months-long siege.
"I think everybody really does have some theme that they keep going back to, no matter how hard they try," she says. So why is this theme so important to her? "It's just somehow at the centre of my heart, what is compelling to me" - she gestures at a waiter who has just passed by - "the idea that the waiter could be the most important person in my life.
And unless I'm open-minded to the waiter, I would miss that. You never know who you're gonna meet, you never know who's gonna change your life, and you have to stay open to those possibilities.
"Either that, or my parents married off and I had a lot of step-siblings. If you like that answer, that would work, too." She laughs. Patchett, 43, is generous with her humour but there is a whiff of caution to her manner, and she has a faint tightness in her face that makes her look from some angles like the actress Emily Watson. (More movie star comparisons: she has the verbal exactitude and endlessly patient tone of Laura Linney.)
The reception for Run has been largely enthusiastic: The Globe's reviewer wrote, "Only a gifted imagination can steep this family brew as plausibly and gracefully as she does." But not everyone has embraced the book. During breakfast, Patchett is still smarting from a dismissive review published two days before in USA Today, and while John Updike had some very nice things to say about her other books in his New Yorker review, he didn't much care for Run.
