Summary
Author: Ann Patchett (b. 1963)
Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 336 pp.
Type of work: Novel
Time: Twentieth and twenty-first centuries
Locales: California; Virginia; Brooklyn
Commonwealth follows the lives of two families, the Cousins and the Keatings, over five decades as their lives become deeply entwined through divorce, death, aging, and adulthood. When daughter Franny Keating dates a well-known writer in her twenties, he adopts their story to create his masterpiece, also called Commonwealth.
Principal characters
Bert Cousins, an assistant district attorneyCourtesy of HarperCollins Publishers
Teresa Cousins, his wife
Albie Cousins, Bert and Teresa’s youngest son
Cal Cousins, Bert and Teresa’s eldest son
Jeanette Cousins, Bert and Teresa’s youngest daughter
Holly Cousins, Bert and Teresa’s eldest daughter
Fix Keating, a lifelong police officer in Los Angeles
Beverly Keating, Fix’s wife
Marjorie, Fix Keating’s long-term partner following his split from Beverly
Frances “Franny” Keating, the Keatings’ younger daughter.
Caroline Keating, the Keatings’ elder daughter
Leon Posen, a famous writer, Franny’s lover
As Commonwealth opens, the Keatings are throwing a christening party for their youngest daughter, Frances (or Franny), at their suburban home in Los Angeles, California. The first chapter, at a sprawling thirty-two pages, feels more like a thrilling short story than the opening to a family epic. The saga that follows takes readers through the decades of personal wreckage that follow the events that transpire at this single party. The party is in full swing as lawyer Bert Cousins, an acquaintance of Fix Keating’s, shows up uninvited and carrying a large bottle of gin, to what had been a dry affair. As the guests become more relaxed, and the day turns to evening, Bert and Beverly Keating, Fix’s wife, find themselves alone in Franny’s nursery. The two met for the first time that evening, but feel a mutual attraction and kiss. The kiss begins an affair that continues for years until they finally leave their spouses and merge their families, with repercussions that echo through the years. The repercussions weave through the lives of their children and former spouses as Patchett expertly balances the story’s progression, while never losing track of her large cast of characters. In less skilled hands, the result could be a jumbled, confusing affair, but Patchett has created memorable, tangible characters who carry the weight of the story with ease.
The structure employed by Patchett in Commonwealth is an essential piece to its emotional gravity. While there is a linear chronology to the overall plotline, the story is told in a series of vignettes that jump in time and that often skip over chunks of time and leaves certain events to be revealed later, or the reader to fill in the gaps. Early in the novel, it is revealed that Fix Keating has terminal cancer. Franny has come to Los Angeles, where Fix remained following the divorce, to accompany her father to a chemotherapy appointment. A clear through-line connects the adult lives of the children, some of whom are still nearly babies when Beverly and Bert decide to wed. Franny and her sister, Caroline, trade holidays and birthdays with their father, while neither has remained particularly close to Beverly, who lives in Virginia. As an adult, Jeanette Cousins lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with her husband and their infant daughter, while her brother Albie has bounced around the United States for much of his adult life. Patchett’s structure allows layers to be peeled back from the “present of the story.” And throughout these layers, Patchett traces the lives of each of the stepsiblings; the reader...
(This entire section contains 1776 words.)
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watches as Franny struggles as a cocktail waitress in Chicago before meeting her future lover, Leon Posen, and being swept into his life as a famous novelist; during Albie’s formative early twenties, he struggles to discover who he is, and is eventually reunited with Jeanette and Franny. The movie version of Leon Posen’s novelCommonwealth, which appears twenty years after the book’s publication (a book no one in Franny’s family wanted or liked), plays a big role in Patchett’s novel. As Ron Charles said in his review for the Washington Post, “In someone else’s hands, Commonwealth would be a saga, a sprawling chronicle of events and relationships spread out over dozens of chapters. But Patchett is daringly elliptical here. . . . We’re not so much told this story as allowed to listen in from another room as a door swings open and closed.”
The most poignant portion of the novel occurs during a chapter when all six children are in Virginia together for an extended summer stay. Teresa has sent her four children without luggage, as a form of revenge for the support she feels she has not received following the divorce, and when they arrive, Beverly is distraught. Jeanette hides in the closet; Calvin watches TV on her bed with his shoes on; and her own daughters are unenthusiastic about their stepsiblings’ visit. During a three-day vacation to a nearby recreation area, the six siblings form a lasting bond, as they trek out to the lake without their parents’ knowledge. Their parents have slept in, and the children are bored. The description of the children finding their way through a field of tall grass, taking Coke breaks, splashing in the lake, and eventually finding their way home without their parents ever realizing they were gone, is key to understanding how the family successfully and unsuccessfully becomes a new unit.
That is, until Calvin’s tragic and untimely death. Sinister, but common, elements surround the children: they regularly skim gin off their parents and most major plot points revolve around the consumption of gin by adults and children alike. Calvin regularly carries his father’s pistol in his pant leg, letting the others pass it around when the mood strikes him. Calvin also regularly gives Benadryl to Albie, whom they all agree is an annoyance, to put him to sleep and give children some peace. (Albie eventually blooms into a juvenile delinquent and accidentally burns down his school). Ironically it is this practice of giving the young boy “tic tacs” that ultimately causes Calvin to lose his life. Cal is highly allergic to bee stings and carries the pills with him in case he should be stung. The day of his death, he is stung, but has run out of Benadryl. The children all watch him, believing he’ is faking, until they realize too late what is actually happening. (Some critics have pointed out the implausibility of these scenario, as epinephrine, not Benadryl, is what would have saved Calvin from anaphylaxis.) This singular moment begins the unraveling of the tenuous connections that had begun to unite the family. Calvin’s death haunts each of the children through their adult lives, and their recollections of what happened never quite match up.
Patchett’s personal history is closely intertwined in the story. She herself grew up in a blended family, and was moved from California to Virginia by her mother when she remarried. She attended the University of Iowa where she received her MFA, and Posen teaches in that very program in the novel. There are hints at family members who were immortalized in her essay collection This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, like her father as a police officer. As she said in an interview with Slate, none of what happens in the novel happened to her, while all of the emotions felt within were felt by her. She has said elsewhere that her family members have been able to pick pieces of themselves out of the cast of characters she has created. She has also mentioned in interviews that she believed it would be fun to explore a sprawling family saga, rather than revisit the closely watched plotlines of her past works. Commonwealth is not a novel of high drama, but rather one of small actions that compound as the story develops.
Following Patchett’s much-loved novels Bel Canto (2001), State of Wonder (2011), and Run (2008), Commonwealth marked a new direction for the author in its autobiographical nature, although Patchett has said that she feels she has been telling the same story, this one, over and over in her work to this point. Critical reception for the book was warm, with many calling it her best effort yet. As Janelle Brown wrote for the Los Angeles Times, “Reading Commonwealth is a transporting experience, as if you’ve stepped inside Patchett’s own juice-saturated memories and are seeing scenes flash by, in all their visceral emotion. It feels like Patchett’s most intimate novel, and is without a doubt one of her best.”
As the novel reaches its end, Franny once again is the focus, as she is for much of the story, and we find her at her mother’s house for Christmas, with her husband and two sons. Snow is falling outside, which rarely happens there, and Franny sneaks away for a moment. Her final moment of remembrance is of a similar snowy evening when Albie came to stay with the family for good after setting the school on fire, and how the two of them found comfort in each other and acceptance. The story she recounts is one that did not make it into Leo Posen’s novel, and she contemplates that on a night far in the future, she’ll again remember that evening, noting, “She had needed to keep something for herself.”
Review Sources
- “Ann Patchett Calls Commonwealth Her ‘Autobiographical First Novel.’” NPR, 8 Sept. 2016, www.npr.org/2016/09/08/493142355/ann-patchett-calls-commonwealth-her-autobiographical-first-novel. Accessed 13 Feb. 2017.
- Brown, Janelle. “Ann Patchett’s Bravura Commonwealth Traces the 50-Year Fallout after an Illicit Kiss.” Review of Commonwealth, by Ann Patchett. Los Angeles Times, 8 Sept. 2016, www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-patchett-commonwealth-20160831-snap-story.html. Accessed 13 Feb. 2017.
- Charles, Ron. “‘Commonwealth’: Ann Patchett’s Masterful Novel of Family and Family Secrets.” Review of Commonwealth, by Ann Patchett. The Washington Post, 6 Sept. 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/commonwealth-ann-patchetts-masterful-novel-of-family-and-family-secrets/2016/09/06/fdc14946-7062-11e6-9705-23e51a2f424d_story.html. Accessed 13 Feb. 2017.
- Churchwell, Sarah. “Commonwealth by Ann Patchett Review—Breathtaking, Perceptive and Poignant.” Review of Commonwealth, by Ann Patchett. The Guardian, 16 Sept. 2016, www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/16/commonwealth-by-ann-patchett-review. Accessed 13 Feb. 2017.
- Hoby, Hermione. “Ann Patchett: ‘If Writers Are to Survive We Must Take Responsibility for Ourselves and Our Industry.’” Review of Commonwealth, by Ann Patchett. The Guardian, 3 Sept. 2016, www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/03/ann-patchett-interview-commonwealth. Accessed 13 Feb. 2017.
- Meyer, Lily. “Ann Patchett on Her New Novel, Writing from Life, and Her Extremely Chill Family.” Review of Commonwealth, by Ann Patchett. Slate, 7 Sept. 2016, www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/09/ann_patchett_discusses_her_new_novel_commonwealth.html. Accessed 13 Feb. 2017.
