Family ties that bind
A book of slippery, subtle, and elusive story-telling, writes David Herkt.
The first chapter of Ann Patchett’s new novel Commonwealth tells it all. In the summer of 1964, handsome deputy district attorney Bert Cousins, carrying a full bottle of gin, makes an unexpected and uninvited appearance at the post-christening party of his colleague Fix Keating’s new daughter.
The golden, loosening effect of the drink on the attendees, and Bert’s deliberate adulterous kiss with Beverley Keating in a bedroom – with the newly christened baby Frances pressed between the couple – sets everything into motion.
It is a well-paced, sure, and superbly-written introduction to Patchett’s world.
This is a book of slippery, subtle, and elusive story-telling, where recollections and people change organically, without the overemphasised plot-points and straightforward characterisation of lesser literature.
Covering 50 years, it is a narrative that plunges a reader into a web of complex relationships and their consequences.
Echoes of long-ago events have shaped and continue to change present lives.
Patchett dodges in and out of a linear time-flow. Bert, now dying, relives the past in morphine dreams. Frances becomes Franny, a drop-out law student waiting tables in a restaurant, where she intrigues the famous novelist Leon Posten with her memories. Posten uses Franny’s story as the basis of a novel, also called Commonwealth.
The way events tie and retie the bonds of obligation, affection, and experience that link families is explored through settings and incidents that range from Zen Buddhism in Switzerland to high school arson.
There are occasional missteps, particularly in the sections that seem to have a more comedic intent, but Commonwealth is an empathetic novel. Patchett’s great skill is in exploring areas of human experience that are often disregarded by other writers. She specialises in those unheralded and startling moments of understanding, exultation, and reconciliation that somehow make everything worthwhile.