Commonwealth (Novel by Ann Patchett, published in 2016)

Commonwealth

(novel by Ann Patchett, published in 2016)

 

Ann Pratchett has a warning to the world, “I'm the old author who is saying, ‘I'm going to sell you out and take your story.’"

 

Those of us that have ambitions as writers read more than the average person because beyond the obvious pleasure of reading, which drove us to write in the first place, we also read to learn the how-to. We generally read a large variety of books, because if we focused only on authors who attack the same themes we tackle, we do nothing but ape our processors, we can’t see the power of language beyond its most familiar application, we bring nothing new in, we become mere “borrowers” and as Pablo Picasso once said, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”

 

But fully drinking the richness of our literature can be intimidating because many of our predecessors and our contemporaries, are also our betters. I am prone to be jealous of these betters and so far, this decade, no one makes me more jealous than Ann Patchett.

 

This is the first of her novels I’ve read, I did so mid-way 2022. I was enraptured starting its 32-page-long first chapter and what followed proved to be book of effortless invention and powerful observation, seemingly plotless, but really a more tightly constructed puzzle than an Agatha Christie. The prose isn’t flashy or self-consciously poetic, but its blank-seeming language sets you up, over and over, for the luminous sentence that one burns into the back of your brain. It smashes its chronology over, and over, and over, and though it has no SF,F,&H elements, writer in that genre writer ever examined the themes of time loops and probabilities with the lovely linear non-linearity as she.

 

That latter aspect of the novel was praised by critic Ron Charles, “In someone else’s hands, ‘Commonwealth’ would be a saga, a sprawling chronicle of events and relationships spread out over dozens of chapters. But Patchett is daringly elliptical here. Not only are decades missing, but they're also out of order. We’re not so much told this story as allowed to listen in from another room as a door swings open and closed.”

 

And critic Janelle Brown observed it was, “Unpretentious and ultimately heartbreaking, miniaturist but also sprawling.” Jocelyn McClurg added, “In fact, this is the rare novel that could have been a good 100 pages longer.” While Jeanne Brown nailed it in one sentence, “The present story lines are overshadowed by the events of the past, the book’s most contemporary scenes existing primarily as an entrée to older memories.” (The novel contains this beautiful line, “He believed her to be the person she was in this present moment, free proves it to be a self-delusion.)

 

Patchett herself told an interviewer, “One of the things I'm obsessed with in all my books is time, and I felt that time in my work was contracting. ... and so, I was very interested in writing a book that covered more time. ... I wanted to be able to move through time and between characters...”

 

Also, the first chapter she offered us a mannerism that introduced as vast an array of characters that few have ever even attempted on the page. Generally, in novels, characters are introduced either one-by-one or in pairs, the reader is brought close to one or two, an environment is built around them, and as the character moves about, they encounter another, then another, and a world is assembled methodically, like laying bricks for a wall. Though this is sometimes derisively referred to as “white room syndrome” but it can be done masterfully, as in Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985) which opens with the narrator waking up alone in a near featureless white room, and then steps outside so the world expands beyond that.

 

This contrasts to cinema, where it’s easier to just dump one’s audience into the middle of a busy world, as the director and screenwriter don't need to methodically build on a first, narrow, impression of setting and characters in the audience’s mind’s eye, all is visualized right in front of them. Director Francis Ford Copula and his co-Screenwriter Marion Puzo were masters of this; the first two “Godfather” films open at parties. The roving camera gives us indelible images of the central characters, demonstrating relationships and pecking orders, before the plot is really engaged.

 

The masterful first chapter of “Commonwealth,” like one of the “Godfathers,” begins at a Christening (the first line, “The christening party took a turn when Albert Cousins arrived with gin.”) One father, Fix Keating, opens the door and greets another father, Albert “Bert” Cousins, whom Fix doesn’t remember inviting because he didn’t; Bert crashed the party to escape his squabbling kids. They do know each other, but only barely. They have pre-existing resentments towards each other, not yet grounded in anything except class prejudice, but also a professional bond, Fix is a beat cop, Bert’s an ADA.

 

Fix is a man’s man and a cop’s cop, with all the expected prejudices of LA law enforcement in the 1960s, plus a moral backbone that makes him always conscious of responsibilities. Meanwhile, Bert’s an utter cad, always demanding to be adored, always inattentive to those who adore him, always knowing how to present himself well, and always looking for an advantageous exit.

 

In less than two pages these two move away from the front door cross through the over-crowded, modestly middle-class abode, more and more people vividly emerge. Most of those we meet in this chapter, all strongly introduced enough to deserve their own book-length narrative, completely disappear from the story after the chapter closes, but all create the all-important context that shape the lives of those whom were will spend the rest of the book with. That context is vital, because the rest of the novel is about that context being shattered and how the characters truly central to the story being increasingly cast adrift over the next fifty years.

 

Also significant is that most of the truly central characters are hardly introduced in this chapter. This book is about Fix and Bert, their then-wives, but mostly about their combined six children. The Christening is for one of these children, Fanny, still an infant, while another child, Albie, is not-quite-yet born.

 

Before the party is over, Bert shares an illicit kiss with Fix’s wife, Beverly, whom Bert has never met before.

 

Chapter two, set almost fifty years later, concerns Fanny visiting Fix while he lay in a hospital bed. We learn this kiss led to an affair, and two divorces. In the wake of the two divorces, Beverly got custody of Fix’s two girls, while Bert’s wife, Theresa, got custody of Bert’s two boys and girls. Bert insisted on relocating to Arlington, Virginia, so he gets to see his own kids only during the summer but had Fix’s kids almost the whole year. This also means that Fix, still in Los Angeles, was mostly denied his children.

 

This chapter also contains two lengthy flashbacks inside the heads of these two characters, so it unfolds standing in three separate decades, a key theme of the novel is how people simultaneously live in their presents and their pasts. ("This was the time she had, these were all the stories she was going to get … more than anything it was to have a chance at the stories he was going to take with him.")

 

And in the story’s disobeyed chronology, there still almost another decade forward still to be told.

 

(Fix tells Franny, “People are scared of the wrong things… We go around thinking that what’s going to get us is waiting on the other side of the door: it’s outside, it’s in the closet, but it isn’t like that. . . For the vast majority of the people on this planet, the thing that’s going to kill them is already on the inside.”)

 

Chapter three unfolds across several years of the 1970s (one of Patchett’s great tricks is we always know when and where we are but she usually doesn’t explicitly identify place until a few paragraphs into a scene and often withholds dates entirely) and that’s when we really see the blended family in action. During the summer, for a few years at least, Bert and Fix’s children have overlapping time in Virginia, that’s where ties are established between them all. ("Here was the most remarkable thing about the Keating children and the Cousins children: they did not hate one another, nor did they possess one shred of tribal loyalty." Also, "When the six of them got together they looked more like a day camp than a family, random children dropped off on the same curb. There was very little evidence of their relation, even among those who were related by blood." After the children bond, the tone changes, “It was like that every summer the six of them were together … Not that the days were always fun, most of them weren’t, but they did things, real things, and they never got caught.”)

 

After these childhood summers come to, these ties seem tenuous to non-existent all outside observers, even themselves, but decades later prove to have a peculiar but lasting strength.

 

From chapter four onwards, the novel focuses on the evolving lives of the six children, but having started with the two father’s was a deft move, one sees the father’s reflected more in the successes and failures of the children than their mothers.

 

(“All the stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn’t listen to, won’t remember, never got right, wasn’t around for. All the ways to get to Torrance.” Torrance is the city where the Cousins’ lived in the 1960s, and where Bert’s wife Theresa resided until to the very end. In this scene, Fritz, to old and frail to drive, is giving directions to his eldest daughter Caroline behind the wheel while Franny sits in the back seat.)

 

Beverly Keating was stunningly beautiful but selfish and social climbing which explains why she destroyed two families for Bert. Teresa Cousin’s, abandoned by Bert, a woman of intelligence and compassion but always sold herself short, which might be why she married Bert in the first place.

 

During the second chapter there is a scene of gun violence during one of the flashbacks, and the third introduces another gun, so according to Chekhov’s famous axiom, this novel should end in a blood-bath. Prachet breaks that rule, and many others, no for the book there is no violence. Pratchettt is constantly setting up expectations, then defying them, and the gun isn’t a plot point but a symbol of how fate shocking changes apparent destinies, like that improbable, drunken, kiss.

 

The children are:

 

Caroline Keating is Fix and Beverly’s eldest daughter, named after President Kennedy’s daughter as many a good Irish cop did in the 1960s. Strong willed and highly intelligent, one can see both her fathers in her as she grows up.

 

Franny Keating is Fix and Beverly’s. She was too young when the divorce happened to be fully a Keating and was raised mostly by Bert, but ultimately comes to love the more deserving Fritz far more. In childhood she and Caroline fought with deep bitterness during childhood because Caroline viewed Fanny a traitor for not hating Bert enough; as Franny grew closer to Fix, she did so to Caroline as well, her family was more whole as she entered her 50s than it was when she was in her childhood and through her twenties. (Franny: “What do the only children do?” Caroline: “We’ll never have to know.”)

 

Fanny also comes to reflect her stepmother, whom she barely knew, in her the way she sold herself short. After dropping out of college she had a worshipful but short relationship with a novelist (“He had found her life meaningful when she could make no sense of it at all.”) and he wrote a book that reflected the blended family’s secrets. (“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.”). The evolution and consequences of that book provide the architecture for the plot which is rigorously constructed even though it often seems as if it the plot isn’t there.

 

Among so many other things, Patchett is exploring the moral issues of the writer’s profession, whether prose based on real events and people is inherently exploitative. This particular theme seemingly arose not out of her family’s reaction to her previous fiction and non-fiction, but Suellen Grealy enraged response to Pratchettt’s non-fiction book about Suellen’s sister Lucy, another writer and Pratchettt’s close friend.

 

Cal Cousins is Bert and Teresa’ eldest son, and as a child ruled the other five. His death in the 1970s seemingly the cut the bonds between all the children, no matter whom their parents were, and triggered yet another divorce. It took place only one decade into a story spanning five, but Pratchettt’s sophisticated non-linear structure assured that this central event was dead central in the book’s pages even though chronologically it happened early.

 

Holly Cousins is Bert and Teresa’s eldest daughter and second child. Second in authority of this fragile tribe, seeming the glue between them (She’s especially close to her step-sister Caroline, “In that sense the two of them had been a team, albeit a team neither one of them wanted to be on.”). Then, after Cal’s death, Holly was the one who removed herself the most by flying across the ocean to an isolated religious commune, almost cloistered in her devotion to a faith that is much an immigrant to the country of Switzerland as she is.

 

Jeanette Cousins is Bert and Teresa’s youngest daughter and third child. Little was expected of her but she proved to have intelligence and backbone no one unrecognized. As an adult she’s not the most successful career-wise, she was starting on an impressive path on but gave that up to marry and raise a child. Her marriage proved the best among the ten central characters, but also a symbol of the separations, she lives the second farthest away from her place of birth, and her husband is one of two inter-racial marriages from the two families that had been so conservative while President Kennedy was in office.

 

Albie is Bert and Teresa’s youngest son and youngest of all the children. As a child he suffered from ADHD, something there was no diagnosis for back then. Insufferable and subtly, unconsciously, abused, he was the one who became the nomad and failure, with his teens and early adulthood dominated by petty crime and substance abuse. But a bit of serendipity brought him into adult Jeanette’s fold and with that, finally a home and stability, redeeming him. (Encountering the adult Albie after years of distance, Franny has a revelation, “He wasn’t the monster they told him he was, in fact there wasn’t anything so awful about him. It was only that he was a little kid.”)

 

Ten central characters is a lot for any book, but as Frannie’s Christening demonstrate, Patchett loves juggling far more. Across the novel’s decades the cast is ever expansive with lovers and spouses, successful marriages for some and a succession of failed ones for others. Family, fractured or otherwise, remains the focus, all the important secondary characters shared with one of the central characters some kind of romantic relationship; meanwhile, friends and colleagues, no matter how vividly drawn, disappear in a few pages.

 

The most important events are those shared by the central ten even though much of their lives are lived apart from each other. One of the themes is how none view the shared experiences the same way. (“How could she have heard a story so many times and just now realize that all of the interesting parts had been left out?”)

 

By the last page, three of the blended family have died and been buried, but the first death told of was outside it, Fix’s patrol partner murdered in a flash back in chapter two. All these deaths are tragic, but the novel is not maudlin, only melancholy. (Near the end, Fritz’s neighborhood didn’t decline as much of older LA communities has, and Fanny it observed of it, “In truth, the story didn’t turn out to be such a bad one,” which could summarize the novel as well.) This is a story that covers more than fifty-years’ time, it is inevitable that some people will die.  

 

Descriptions of the earlier episodes vividly describe and contrast LA with various parts of Virgina, and LA is treated with far more affection as oranges and mixed drinks become the symbol of familial ties, while Virginia’s symbol is in the title, representing how the two families stop being two strong republics in California and are reduced to a fragile commonwealth in Virgina (California, of course, was once its own Republic, while Virgina is one of four designated officially designated Commonwealths). By the time the novel ends, none of the five remaining children live in Virgina, four are spread across three states, including California, and one is an ocean way.

 

Of the symbolism of the title, critic Sarah Churchwell writes, “So ‘commonwealth’ is a loaded, even paradoxical term in the United States, one that might variously denote sharing prosperity, mutual greed or serving the greater good; unity with the body politic or autonomy from it. Independence or collectivity: the great question America never answers.”

 

Patchett’s mother is novelist Jeanne Ray and source of the famous quote, “None of it happened and all of it's true,” which is beloved by the above-mentioned Francis Ford Coppola. Patchett called “Commonwealth” her “Autobiographical First Novel," a bit of a joke as it was actually her book seventh:

 

“My parents got divorced when I was young, and my mother married someone who had four children. And we moved to the other side of the country, albeit not to Virginia. And I think that that being thrown together, being pulled out of a family and put into a family has always been very interesting to me. ... It's so complicated. It's so complicated to figure out who you're going to spend Christmas with.

 

“I’ve always been writing about my family, but up until now I'd been very clever to hide everyone in giant costumes made out of chicken wire and masking tape.”

 

Pratchettt was born in 1963, so it’s pretty obvious unaccomplished Franny is based heavily on her very accomplice self, and Patchett offered up some self-praise that was entirely deserved, “But the wonderful thing about publishing this book at 52 is that I know that I am capable of working from a place of deep imagination. Now I just feel like I own every part of myself and my life and my imagination and the rocky terrain of my own brain, and that feels really good.”

 

 

Almost all the characters are treated with the greatest compassion even though almost all also commit at least one great sin. Pratchettt though is kinda merciless towards Bert and Beverly though. Interviews she reveals that though she acknowledges this work is autobiographical, she also describes her real-life stepdad as her “champion.” And as for her real-life mother, “I adored her mother… I went to live with her mother a couple of times. She was always taking me in. She gave me some of the best advice, including but not limited to, ‘Never settle for bad sex.’”

 

In a different interview she said, "What I've realized is that all of my books have been the same book," she says. "I write a book that is about a group of people who are pulled out of one family or situation and dropped into another one in which they are not familiar, and then I see how communities are formed.”

 

Of this book, critic Jennifer Senior wrote, “I went from bristling to weeping at 3 a.m.”