LIFE Patchett is in stellar form in ‘Commonwealth’
Ann Patchett opens her splendid new novel Common
wealth (Harper, 322 pp., out of eeee four), with one of the most enticing first sentences I have read in ages:
“The christening party took a turn when Albert Cousins arrived with gin.”
Just try to stop reading. And you won’t want to. Commonwealth is first-rate Patchett ( Bel
Canto, State of Wonder), a novel about two families reconfigured by divorce that’s both tenderhearted and tough, dryly funny and at times intensely moving.
That christening party in 1960s Southern California turns out to be as seismic as an earthquake. Bert Cousins, a deputy DA with a restless itch, shows up uninvited at Fix Keating ’s house and sets eyes on the Irish cop’s impossibly beautiful wife, Beverly. Juice from fresh California oranges mixed with Bert’s bottle of gin makes for a potent cocktail that will change all their lives.
Fast-forward 50 years. Franny, the baby at the christening party, is with her father, Fix, at the UCLA Medical Center, where he’s getting chemo and telling her the story of how Beverly came to be Fix’s ex-wife and Bert’s second wife.
Patchett’s episodic approach, skipping among characters and decades, teasing out details, allows her to weave a rich tapestry of a tale that never wastes a word. (This is the rare novel that could have been 100 pages longer.)
When Bert marries Beverly, he leaves behind his beleaguered exwife Teresa and four little kids, Cal, Holly, Jeanette and bratty Albie. Fix’s two daughters, Caroline and Franny, live with Beverly and Bert in Virginia. The California kids spend every summer in Virginia as a blended family — until the unthinkable happens one day.
When she is in her 20s, Franny is a law-school dropout working as a cocktail waitress at the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago. Leon Posen, her literary idol who’s her father’s age, is sitting at the bar one night downing Scotches; it’s been 12 long years since this Norman Mailer-like star produced one of his “beautiful novels.”
“I’ve come a long way so that I could have a drink and not be anywhere near another writer,” Posen tells Franny in a line that’s typical of Patchett’s crackling dialogue.
After Posen and Franny become lovers, he “borrows” as inspiration her family tragedy, and the result, his novel Common
wealth, wins the National Book Award.
Patchett’s Commonwealth is a novel that Boomers in particular will relish as they remember their own under-supervised childhoods, and it has a satisfying Franzen-esque patina. She is smart about siblings and how they relate as kids and grownups, about how relationships shift over time, too, between parents and children, about how we forgive each other.
And it’s a book so refreshingly honest you can’t help but laugh. When Teresa finds out Bert will get custody of her four kids every summer, at first she weeps, until she wonders “if she hadn’t just been handed the divorce equivalent of a Caribbean vacation.”
If Commonwealth has a weak spot, it’s Franny, the sponge-like central child who is too nice/ bland for her own good amid a sea of sharp-edged and sharply drawn characters.
Call it a quibble.