Ann Patchett is drawn to the often unexpected bonds people form in unusual circumstances. Many of her novels are predicated on what might be called the Magic Mountain syndrome, which she described succinctly in an essay in her 2013 collection, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage: "a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society in confinement." In Bel Canto, high-profile guests attending a lavish birthday party for a powerful, opera-loving Japanese businessman in South America pair off in unanticipated combinations when they are held hostage. In State of Wonder, a team of research scientists in pursuit of a missing colleague and a miracle fertility drug in the Amazon rain forest find themselves relying on each other in new ways in the heart of darkness. And in Commonwealth, her most autobiographical novel to date, six stepsiblings from two broken marriages are thrown together during court-mandated summer vacations in Virginia, forming a surprisingly tight-knit "fierce little tribe." The children, four girls and two boys, are united in part by their shared disillusionment with the two parents whose affair instigated the implosion of their original families. But after the oldest boy dies during one of their unsupervised escapades, they drift apart — yet remain forever linked by their uneasy sense of guilty complicity.
Commonwealth opens with another classic narrative catalyst: the uninvited guest. On a hot June Sunday in the 1960s, Beverly and Francis Xavier (Fix) Keating throw a christening party for the younger of their two daughters, Franny. Because many of the attendees are Fix's fellow cops from the Los Angeles Police Department, "half the party was armed." The afternoon takes a turn when an uninvited guest shows up bearing a bottle of gin. The interloper is Bert Cousins, a deputy DA, who is on the lam from weekend daddy duty with his three kids. From the moment he spots beautiful Beverly Keating he's smitten. Unlike his pregnant wife, Teresa, Beverly has kept herself up and is dazzling in her yellow dress. Bert notes enviously that "Fix Keating had fewer children and a nicer watch and a foreign car and a much-better- looking wife" — all this despite the fact that "The guy hadn't even made detective." Before the party is over, he will have kissed the hostess and set in motion a chain of events that will reverberate over the next five decades.
There have been early glimpses of the personal story behind Commonwealth in Patchett's work. The title essay in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage addresses the author's long family history of failed marriages and the generational "flotsam" from divorce — which led to Patchett's early decision not to have children. It also contributed to two prominent themes in much of her work, including Commonwealth: commitment, and the importance of compassion to get through life. Both were factors in Patchett's late, happy second marriage, which took her by surprise.
There is no shortage of great literature about the fallout from divorce and the reconfigured families that children are left to cope with. (Martha McPhee's Bright Angel Time, featuring a motley gang of stepsiblings under the sway of a charismatic guru- like stepfather, springs to mind as another example of what in today's world of intensely focused parenting seems like carelessness if not outright neglect.) Commonwealth stands out on many levels, from its assured handling of complex time shifts to Patchett's extraordinary compassion even for seriously flawed characters like Bert. Her deeper sympathies clearly lie with Bert and Beverly's two betrayed spouses, saintly Teresa Cousins and warm Fix Keating, who eventually find happiness with kinder partners. They also benefit from the tag-teaming care of their grown children in their final years. "What do the only children do?" Franny Keating asks her sister after a difficult eighty-third birthday outing with their dying father. "We'll never have to know," Caroline answers. In fact, Commonwealth — like Patchett's essay "The Wall" — can be read in part as a love song to her father, who, like Fix, was a detective with the LAPD.
Patchett's gift for characterization and empathy extends to each of the six children, from smart, bossy Caroline, who pleases both her father and stepfather by becoming a lawyer, to wayward Albie, Bert's youngest, who is most affected by his older brother's death, for reasons I'll leave for readers to discover. If there's a hole in her narrative, it's Beverly, who remains a void beneath the surface of her multi-husband-catching glamorous looks.
Franny Keating is the linchpin of the novel. While her christening party is ground zero for Beverly and Bert's ultimately doomed relationship, it's Franny's childhood memories — confided to a famous washed-up writer she meets while working as a barmaid in Chicago after dropping out of law school — that change the thrust of Patchett's book. This narrative line, while initially jarring, ultimately elevates Commonwealth above your usual broken-home saga. When Leon Posen channels Franny's stories into a wildly successful novel (also called Commonwealth), she is torn between her happiness about her role in his comeback and her serious misgivings about the propriety of having divulged family secrets.
Although Posen's behavior is somewhat monstrous — he's a married drunk thirty-two years older than Franny who milks her devotion and lack of direction — Patchett resists demonizing him. Franny and Leon's relationship was "built on admiration and mutual disbelief," she writes, and Franny "was the cable on which he had pulled himself hand over hand back into his work: she was the electricity, the spark . . . And more than that, he had found her life meaningful when she could make no sense of it at all." Yes, "She had made a terrible error in judgment," Patchett writes with typical judiciousness, but "he had turned it into something permanent and beautiful."
Yet among all the troubling aspects of their relationship, the "nail in the tire" turns out to be Franny's anguish over having betrayed her primary bond with her extended family. She realizes the gravity of her transgression when her estranged stepbrother turns up, horrified after coming across a copy of Posen's novel and recognizing himself in its pages.
It's worth stepping away from Patchett's absorbing narrative to realize that she is after something extraordinary here: In a novel based loosely on her own disjointed childhood — the closest to home she's ever come in her fiction — she is raising questions about the propriety of going public about such shared, private experiences. Who owns the story? Who has the right to turn it into a book that will sell thousands of copies and be read by strangers?
Although in Patchett's scenario Franny doesn't actually write Commonwealth, she feels guilty for having shared what wasn't hers alone, enabling Leon Posen to capitalize on it. Patchett, however, has written a version (presumably heavily fictionalized) of her family's story in this novel. And as she did in Truth & Beauty, a searing memoir of her friendship with Lucy Grealy, she has incorporated into her art her compunctions about telling a story that isn't entirely hers to tell. In an age where so little is sacrosanct, this is remarkable.
Heller McAlpin is a New York–based critic who reviews books for NPR.org, The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and other publications.
Reviewer: Heller McAlpin
