Ann Patchett’s ‘Commonwealth’ is uncommonly beautiful story of love, loss

Readers familiar with Ann Patchett’s essay collection “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage” will recognize autobiographical aspects in her new novel, which could easily have been titled “This Is the Story of an Unhappy Marriage.”

But Patchett’s seventh novel is much more than that. “Commonwealth” is a sly book about storytelling, a story about a single incident — really two pivotal incidents — spun out over the length of a narrative constructed like a conversation but encompassing decades.

In addition to its intelligently crafted underpinnings, it also poses a question: Do we own our experiences?

In a recent author profile in Publishers Weekly, Patchett described her own childhood in the ’70s: “We were free-range children. We were put outside in the morning and gathered back in the night — no T-ball, no dance lessons, no birthday parties.”

This same free-wheeling domestic scene opens “Commonwealth.” In Los Angeles, the Keatings are hosting a christening party for their almost 1-year-old baby, Frances. Fix Keating, a cop, opens the door to a deputy district attorney that he is pretty sure is not on the guest list.

But Bert Cousins, indeed an uninvited guest trying to escape the chaos of his own household with three small kids and another on the way, is carrying a bottle of gin as a party gift. The gin changes the party atmosphere to loose and loopy.

Bert is good-looking, but Fix’s wife, Beverly, is drop-dead gorgeous: “In this city where beauty had been invented she was possibly the most beautiful woman he had ever spoken to, certainly the most beautiful woman he had ever stood next to in a kitchen.”

In the crush of kids and their parents, Fix realizes he doesn’t know where his baby is. He sends Bert, whom he finally recognizes from a case in which they convicted a car thief, to find the baby. Bert finds the baby, and he also finds the mother. Untethered by an afternoon spent mixing cocktails together, they share a kiss.

This transgressive kiss is the first of the pair of chance occurrences that propel this novel.

Bert and Beverly fall in love and out of their marriages. After the divorces, Bert and Beverly move to Virginia with Franny, the aforementioned baby, and her sister Caroline. Bert’s ex-wife, Teresa, stays in L.A. with their four kids.

But every year the four children travel to Virginia for the entire summer: “Four little stair-steps, boy-girl-girl-boy, each one a glassy-eyed refugee.” The six children, when together, are melded together “like a pack of feral dogs.”

Over one of these loosely supervised summer vacations in Virginia a fatal accident occurs. This is the second pivotal event that changes everything.

Patchett never describes the fateful day directly. The incident is reconstructed through the refracted memories, dreams and visions of the central characters.

And then the entire truth of the tragedy is appropriated by a novelist 32 years Franny’s senior, her lover of several years, who writes a blockbuster novel that wins the National Book Award. So, an appropriated story and an inappropriate kiss are the high stakes of Patchett’s novel.

But plot doesn’t make for great literature, and this book is breathtakingly great.

The characters — among them Franny and her father, Fix; Albie, the baby-on-the way when Bert and Beverly kiss, who grows up to read his family’s story in a famous novel; Franny’s take-charge older sister, Caroline; and Bert’s ex-wife, Teresa — are rendered in all their flawed human glory through quirky and telling details. Not a word is wasted here.

And although the main narrative is one of almost unspeakable loss, there is great humor, including a darkly funny send-up of the famous author’s literary circle in the Hamptons.

The stories we don’t tell define us as much as the ones we do. Patchett explores this in a novel that expands, contracts and plays with time. “Commonwealth” is an affecting, beautiful, truthful novel.

This story was originally published September 10, 2016 at 7:10 AM with the headline "Ann Patchett’s ‘Commonwealth’ is uncommonly beautiful story of love, loss."