In story of a blended family, life is long and layered
In the blended Keating-Cousins family, summers feel endless.
The four Cousins kids and two Keating daughters have had to share their summer months (and a single bathroom) in Virginia ever since their parents ripped apart their tidy 1960s families and sewed them back together in a different arrangement. In Ann Patchett’s novel “Commonwealth,” those long, hot days incubate the bonds and allegiances, secrets and resentments that will carry this reluctant family through a lifetime.
It starts at a christening party for nearly 1-year-old Franny Keating. Her dad, a Los Angeles cop, has invited a houseful of police-officer friends to a civilized afternoon affair. Then Bert Cousins from the DA’s office shows up on the porch, uninvited, with a bottle of gin.
The gin, served with fresh-squeezed juice from the orange trees outside, turns a Sunday-afternoon christening into a party where even the kids get a little drunk. Then Bert Cousins kisses Beverly Keating.
Soon after, Bert and Beverly divorce their spouses, marry each other and move from sunny California to the commonwealth of Virginia, and now here their children are together — hiding in closets, fighting over the cat, watching forbidden TV on Bert and Beverly’s bed. Albie Cousins, the 6-yearold baby of the family, follows Beverly through the house, accompanying her every move with a stripper soundtrack: “Boom chicka-boom, boom-boom chicka-boom.” And Franny Keating, Beverly’s younger daughter, takes refuge in the living room, “pulling the cat’s front legs through the armholes of a doll’s dress and crying so quietly that her mother was sure that every single thing she had ever done in her life up until that moment was a mistake.”
Together, the six kids “looked more like a day camp than a family, random children dropped off on the same curb.” This, the author’s fans will recognize, is the Patchett pattern.
Patchett herself has pointed out that her novels — as different as they are, from the South American hostage story of “Bel Canto” to the Amazon jungle exploration of “State of Wonder” — all share the same basic plot: Strangers are thrown together by circumstance and must find ways to work together. With “Commonwealth,” Patchett also has produced fiction that echoes her own childhood: Her father was an L.A. cop and, when her parents divorced, she and her sister blended into a family of four more children.
The Cousins and Keating kids eventually get along, bonded by the fact that they dislike their parents far more than they dislike each other. And the five oldest kids soon learn that giving Albie, the youngest and most annoying, a dose of Benadryl will put him right to sleep. They’ll feed Albie several pink pills — which big brother Cal has to carry for his allergies — then leave him behind to do whatever they want: steal gin, sneak away, carry around the gun Bert Cousins keeps in the glove compartment of the car.
The joy of that summer freedom ends abruptly. Stung by a bee at his grandparents’ house, 15-year-old Cal dies there in the grass, without Benadryl or help. When the other kids are asked about the events of that confusing day, they never tell the whole story. Individually, none of them even fully understands what happened.
They take their secrets into adulthood, until Franny meets a famous author — Leon Posen, decades her elder — and, as they begin an affair, tells him everything she knows. He turns her family’s story into a best-selling novel, called “Commonwealth,” that wins the National Book Award.
When Albie discovers he novel, he is drawn to e story even before he derstands that it’s his. The story started with two parents having an affair, he
realizes, but the story “wasn’t so much about the miserable affair. It was about the inestimable burden of their lives: the work, the houses, the friendships, the marriages, the children, as if all the things they’d wanted and worked for had cemented the impossibility of any sort of happiness.”
As the years go by, the Keating and Cousins kids forge their own paths to seek their own happiness. They spread out and come together again, aging out of old resentments and forming bonds they never expected.
“This was the pleasure of a long life,” Franny thinks, “the way some things worked themselves out.”
Patchett’s novel can’t be reduced to a single story line; like life, it sprawls across too much time to be about just one thing. The chapters jump around in time, and details that seem unimportant in the moment become deeply significant years later. Patchett gives us funny, flawed characters, and the rich reward of “Commonwealth” is seeing their lives unfold and expand across the years — watching them work through traumas and betrayals to find perspective and claim their own life stories.
Years later, when Teresa Cousins — Bert’s ex-wife — is in her 70s, she’ll forget for years at a time to ask her children how their father is “because she simply didn’t think of him.” What once burned as rage has become just a piece of her story, a divorce that happened long ago.
And Franny and Caroline Keating, rivals as children, learn to rely on each other as adults. On their ailing father’s 83rd birthday, they help Teresa Cousins get to the hospital — a favor to Albie, who in adulthood has become their friend. The years have become a web that connects them all.
“Oh, my love. What do the only children do?” a tired Franny asks her sister.
Caroline replies: “We’ll never have to know.”