Commonwealth
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3.8 • 27 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
'Dazzling … life-affirming and compulsively readable' Sunday Times
'Patchett blends wisdom and humanity jointly with the icy forensic gaze of someone not afraid to expose the frailties of human behaviour ... Read it' Jojo Moyes
'An outstanding novel ... a master of her art' Observer
It is 1964: Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited and notices a heart stoppingly beautiful woman. When he kisses Beverly Keating, his host's wife, he sets in motion the joining of two families, whose shared fate will be defined on a day seven years later.
In 1988, Franny Keating, now twenty-four, is working as a cocktail waitress in Chicago. When she meets the famous author Leon Posen one night at the bar, and tells him about her family, she unwittingly relinquishes control over their story…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Patchett (State of Wonder) draws from personal experience for a funny, sad, and ultimately heart-wrenching family portrait: a collage of parents, children, stepchildren, siblings, and stepsiblings. In 1960s California, lawyer Bert Cousins divorces Teresa, leaving her to raise their four children alone; Beverly Keating divorces Fix, an L.A. cop; and Bert and Beverly marry and relocate to Virginia with Beverly and Fix's two children. Visiting arrangements result in an angry, resentful younger generation rebellious Cal, frustrated Holly, practical Jeannette, littlest Albie, bossy Caroline, kind-hearted Franny spending part of summer vacations together. Left unsupervised, Cal takes charge, imitating grown-ups by drinking and carrying a gun, until a fatal accident puts an end to shared vacations. Patchett follows the surviving children into adulthood, focusing on Franny, who confides to novelist Leo Posen stories of her childhood, including the secret behind the accident. Twenty years after that conversation, middle-aged with children and stepchildren of their own, Franny and Caroline take 83-year-old Fix to see the movie version of Leo's novel about their family. Patchett elegantly manages a varied cast of characters as alliances and animosities ebb and flow, cross-country and over time. Scenes of Franny and Leo in the Hamptons and Holly and Teresa at a Zen meditation center show her at her peak in humor, humanity, and understanding people in challenging situations. What's more challenging, after all, than a family like the Commonwealth of Virginia, made up of separate entities bound together by chance and history?
Customer Reviews
Class act
4.5 stars
Author
American. Alumnus of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, whose mother is a novelist too. Published her first novel in 1992. This was her sixth, so she takes her time. Bel Canto (2001) won both the PEN/Faulkner and Orange Prize in 2002. The Dutch House (2019) was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2020. Ms P's also a bookstore owner - Parnassus Books - which is a big deal in "indie" literary circles.
Plot
Starts at an afternoon christening party the burbs of southern California in the early 1960s. Beverley and Fix Keating's place (Fix is a contraction of Francis Xavier, I think) is festooned with Catholics, mostly police and people from the DA's office, law enforcement being a popular vocation among the Irish diaspora all across the USA at the time, not just Boston and NYC. Young Franny is the baby getting her head wet, but most of the adults are more consumed with their own concerns. Bert Cousins is an ADA who doesn't really know Fix very well, but heard about the party on the grapevine and decided to go. His alternative is staying home with his pregnant wife and three young kids, and he's just about over that. Bert brings a bottle of gin with him as present, largely because he had it on the shelf at home. It's only one bottle, but in a "loaves and fishes" type miracle, the assembled throng is soon decidedly merry: booze and miracles both being crowd favourites among Catholics. The upshot is that Bert and Beverley decide to leave their respective spouses and start a new life together in Virginia, as you would. Virginia is one of four US states that's a Commonwealth - the others are Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts - which is part of the reason for the title. The narrative follows the Keating and Cousins families - four parents, six children - over the next fifty years, by which time Fix is dying of cancer. Franny in her 20s gets involved in a relationship with a much older man, a blocked writer who salvages his career by fictionalising - thinly - the convoluted story of his young GF's family. That book is called - you guessed it - "Commonwealth."
Writing
In it's original conception, "commonwealth" meant shared prosperity and mutual self-serving, but has become a loaded, paradoxical term in the US. Ms Patchett's title works at several levels. Clever, eh? The book itself is artfully crafted with all characters possessing their good points. The author also makes astute observations about the siblings and half-siblings, specifically how they grow out of their childhood differences.
Bottom line
Ms Patchett is a class act. Bel Canto got rave reviews, but I liked this better.