The central driver of the plot is Franny’s relationship, in her twenties, with Leo, a famous ageing novelist, who uses her family secrets as the basis of an award winning novel. By skipping back and forth through time Patchett sketches their lives as she effortlessly shifts from a raucus gin-fuelled party in the 60s to a present day cancer ward and chemotherapy session to childhood summers filled with unknown dangers. The drama emerges from the relationships and their ties to a past which flows naturally in and out of the narrative.
All of their life choices and decisions are informed by character and circumstance and yet none of them follow what could be a clichéd path. Patchett’s strength in this book is charting the growth of these characters. In a sometimes circular fashion, Patchett traces the lives of the six Cousins and Keating children who ended up spending summers together in Virginia as they grew up until a tragedy throws them all apart. Attending almost by accident while trying to escape his own wife and children, Bert Cousins catches sight of Fix’s wife Beverly and the rest is history. Policeman Fix Keating is celebrating the birth of his second daughter Frannie, little knowing that this party will bring with it a seismic upheaval not only to his life but the lives of two families. And while at first blush their members seem to fall into identifiable types, nothing is that simple.Ĭommonwealth opens at a christening in 1964. Not that the families in Commonwealth are unhappy, per se, but they are complex. The book at first feels like an example of the old Tolstoyan cliché that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. After spending time in the Amazon in the magnificent State of Wonder, Ann Patchett comes home in her latest novel, Commonwealth.
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