Ann Patchett's last novel, State of Wonder, was set in the Amazonian rainforest and featured a group of scientists attempting to find a cure for post-menopausal infertility. Patchett not only invented an indigenous tribe (the Lakashi – supposedly named after her favourite breakfast cereal) but fictionalised an entire ecosystem.
Before that, Bel Canto, the novel that won Patchett the 2002 Orange Prize, was based on the 1996-1997 Japanese Embassy hostage crisis in Peru and explored themes of death, fate and love in the midst of a terrorist attack. Suffice it to say, the American-born Patchett has never been afraid to challenge herself.
Yet at first glance, her new novel, Commonwealth, seems to have less lofty ambitions. It is set closer to home. There are no imagined tribeswomen in the American states of California and Virginia. The narrative scope seems more modest too: Patchett's subject is a blended family of divorced parents with six children between them.
The book opens in 1960s Los Angeles, when lawyer Bert Cousins attends a christening party and falls in love with another man’s wife. The beautiful Beverly Keating is the mother of two young girls, one of whom is baby Frannie, the newly christened child.
Despite the fact that Patchett’s first chapter deals with a coup de foudre that will eventually result in the implosion of two families, it is a masterclass in understated description. She is a writer who heightens emotion by underplaying it and by pitching the dazzling against the mundane, so that when Bert first leans in to kiss Beverly, he notices “the smell of her perfume which had somehow managed to float gently above the familiar stench of the diaper pail”.
Past and present
From there, the book takes a circular approach to time, ebbing back and forth between past and present. Bert divorces his wife, Teresa. Beverly leaves her police officer husband, Fix, taking her two daughters and relocating to Virginia. Every summer, the children are packed off for summer holidays in second homes trailing suitcases and spare clothes. They forge uneasy alliances, bonded by mutual experience.
On Bert’s side, there is rebellious Cal and his younger siblings: Holly, Jeanette and Albie, who annoys everyone by being small and difficult and constantly singing “boom chicka-boom” as he follows Beverly around the house in “a voice that was weirdly sexual for a six-year-old. She meant to ignore it but after a while he proved too much for her.”
And then there are Beverly’s daughters: the bossy, forceful Caroline and kind-hearted Frannie who only ever wants to please. Unsupervised for much of the summer, they are left to look after themselves, until a tragic accident binds them together in ways they could never have imagined.
Years later, Frannie is working as a cocktail waitress when she meets famed novelist Leo Posen and ends up recounting her family history. Posen, with that “splinter of ice” in the writer’s heart so accurately described by Graham Greene, later takes the story as inspiration for a bestselling novel, also called Commonwealth.
Familial structure
The backdrop is domestic; the structure is familial. In the hands of another, lesser author it might have run the risk of becoming mundane. But Patchett elevates the ordinary to ask big questions about the nature of love and memory, the passing of time and the peculiar, intimate havoc that siblings and parents and children can wreak on each other.
Commonwealth is a great novel about small moments. Patchett is brilliant at observing those tiny inflections of behaviour that give away so much. She is one of those rare writers, like Anne Enright or Anne Tyler, who is able to convey poignancy and humour in the space of a single sentence. She’s particularly good at a certain type of woman, whose hopes about life have been slowly dashed in middle-age.
So when Beverly has sex with Bert on the diningroom carpet: “it wasn’t comfortable . . . Every thrust pushed her back a quarter inch, dragging her skin against the wool blend.” Afterwards, “staring up at the ceiling, Beverly counted five places where the crystals on the chandelier were missing. She hadn’t noticed it before.”
It’s a testament to Patchett’s skill that she is able to manoeuvre smoothly through multiple perspectives and time periods. Her authorial voice, while insightful and humorous, is never obtrusive. We feel sympathy for everyone in turn, even those who have behaved badly.
Each child is clearly individual, defined with such easy intimacy that you immediately know who they are. Patchett always shows rather than tells: it’s what her characters do, rather than what is explained about them that conveys so much. And while the novel-within-a-novel device might be too arch for some tastes, this is a tiny quibble in an otherwise beautiful book.
Commonwealth is written with wisdom, concision and compassion: reading it leaves you understanding just that little bit more about what it is to be human.
Elizabeth Day is the author of Paradise City, published by Bloomsbury.
