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Summary
Summary
"Exquisite. . .Commonwealth is impossible to put down." -- New York Times
#1 New York Times Bestseller | NBCC Award Finalist | New York Times Best Book of the Year | USA Today Best Book | TIME Magazine Top 10 Selection | Oprah Favorite Book | New York Magazine Best Book of The Year
The acclaimed, bestselling author--winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize--tells the enthralling story of how an unexpected romantic encounter irrevocably changes two families' lives.
One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly--thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.
Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved. Spending summers together in Virginia, the Keating and Cousins children forge a lasting bond that is based on a shared disillusionment with their parents and the strange and genuine affection that grows up between them.
When, in her twenties, Franny begins an affair with the legendary author Leon Posen and tells him about her family, the story of her siblings is no longer hers to control. Their childhood becomes the basis for his wildly successful book, ultimately forcing them to come to terms with their losses, their guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they feel for one another.
Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a meditation on inspiration, interpretation, and the ownership of stories. It is a brilliant and tender tale of the far-reaching ties of love and responsibility that bind us together.
Author Notes
Ann Patchett was born on December 2, 1963. She received the Orange Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2002 for her novel Bel Canto. Her other novels include The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft, The Magician's Assistant, and State of Wonder. She has also written several nonfiction works including Truth and Beauty: A Friendship, The Getaway Car, The Bookshop Strikes Back, and This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage.
Ann's title's Commonweatlth and The Patron Saint of Liars made the New York Time bestseller list.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Patchett's domestic tale, a stolen kiss at a christening party in the 1960s leads to a new blended family of six stepsiblings whom the novel follows over 50 years. Reader Davis, a well-known actress and frequent contributor to the radio program Selected Shorts, boasts a robust resume, but her vocal performance for this title is uneven. On the plus side, Davis's gentle and unpretentious voice is pleasant, and fits well with the muted emotional climate of the family. But in Davis's reading, it's hard to distinguish between the six siblings, and as a result the story as a whole falls flat. Only Caroline, the oldest and most combative of the children, comes across as uniquely individual. In a novel that depends so heavily on dialogue and characterization, Davis's monochromatic performance fails to realize the richness of Patchett's careful observations. A Harper hardcover. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
An adulterous affair brings two California families uneasily together in this story set over five decades Ann Patchett's seventh novel begins in the early 1960s, at Beverly and Fix Keating's christening party for their daughter Franny. An unexpected guest turns up, with a large bottle of gin in lieu of an invitation. Bert Cousins is a lawyer in the Los Angeles district attorney's office; Fix Keating is a local cop. They barely know each other, but Bert wants an excuse to escape a home with three small children and a pregnant wife. With the help of Bert's gin, everyone gets drunk and many lives are changed. Handsome Bert kisses beautiful Beverly, sparking an affair that splits and reconfigures their families. Eventually Bert and Beverly leave their spouses, marry and move to Virginia, where their six children come together each summer. Commonwealth crosscuts between the lives of the Keating and Cousins families over the next five decades, as tragedy strikes and life unfolds. In her 20s, Franny Keating begins a relationship with the renowned novelist Leon Posen, a much older man in desperate need of inspiration for a new book. The stories she tells him of her childhood sow the seeds for his bestselling comeback, also entitled "Commonwealth". The impact of that novel, and the secrets it reveals, spin the threads Patchett uses to stitch together the stories of 10 people: the six Keating-Cousins children and their four parents. All of this will make Commonwealth sound like a domestic novel, and it is -- one of the finest in recent memory, which is reason enough to admire it. But the word "commonwealth" also flies like a flag over this book, suggesting a broader field of vision. The story primarily shifts between California, the state that most symbolises the American dream, and Virginia, one of America's four designated "commonwealth" states. America's various founding narratives often invoke the idea of commonwealth; in Virginia, the word is used to suggest the state's autonomous and original national role, its prehistory as the earliest colony. Virginia was the home of both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and thus also the birthplace of the declaration of independence; it is as symbolic as Massachusetts (by no coincidence another commonwealth). But America itself is also a commonwealth: a republic in which everyone has a collective interest, and an equal voice. 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. Although it is uneasily united, often divisive and rancorous, the newly formed Keating-Cousins family never reduces to mere national allegory, however. Part of Patchett's design is to curve every type, bend every cliche, adulterate every formula. (One of her slyest turns is to plant a gun in the novel in bold defiance of Chekhov's famous axiom, insinuating that a "commonwealth" might appear to hinge on guns and actually be about something else entirely.) The youngest of the six children, Albie Cousins, appears early on to be emerging as a familiar version of a fictional troubled teen, who nearly burned down the high school as a teenager, and whose adult life is shrouded in the kind of dubious mystery that seems always to veil adults in novels who are estranged from their families. For much of the story the other characters don't know what's happened to her, but they're sure it isn't good. Patchett tempts the reader into concluding that Albie was born bad, and this will be the tale of a child sociopath, a novel asking whether evil is intractable. But she is up to something far more subtle, startling and painful than that. There is nothing inevitable or fated here, unless it is that actions have consequences, most of which are unintended. A person might seem "unbearable", but then the narrating mind suggests, "maybe that's the real problem", that a person who seems unbearable may rather be "emblematic of what can never be overcome". When the whole tragic power of her story hits the reader, about two-thirds of the way through, the effect is physically breathtaking. Patchett sucker-punches you, but leaves you feeling you had it coming -- whether for underestimating her, or her characters, or humanity, is hard to say. In particular, Commonwealth is one of the most discerning novels about siblings I can recall. One pair of stepsiblings share an equivocal bond: "In that sense the two of them had been a team, albeit a team neither one of them wanted to be on." Sisters Franny and Caroline fought all the way through childhood, with real bitterness. In a more conventional story, that rancour would follow them, and they would end distant, estranged adults. In Commonwealth, they grow out of it, finding a deep bond in their shared past, a common understanding of their complicated family that no one else grasps. When their father's second wife criticises a choice they made, Caroline reassures her sister that even if it makes no sense to other people, she knows they did the right thing. A grateful Franny asks: "What do the only children do?" to which Caroline responds: "We'll never have to know." The novel is alive with provocative insights that sum up entire relationships: "His daughter from his first marriage always needed money because she needed so much more than money but money was the easiest way for her to express those needs." That sentence perfectly sums up her technique: it begins with a disagreeable type and ends with wise and generous sympathy for a human being. There are no lazy shortcuts. The neighbourhood in Los Angeles where the story begins, for example, has not, as one might have predicted, taken a downturn in recent years: "In truth, the story didn't turn out to be such a bad one," the narrator observes of the neighbourhood; by implication, the same applies to Patchett's entire tale. No one in it is worthless. The commonwealth of this novel is family, it is nation, it is history shared and history lost. Late in the novel, Franny and Caroline travel with their father to see Teresa Cousins, Bert's first wife. Former cop Fix Keating, expert in the streets of LA, directs them through a back route to their old neighbourhood, Torrance. "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." All the ways to get to Torrance are our commonwealth: all the ways to write a novel, to become a family, to remember the past. All the ways to inhabit America, to be a nation. All the ways to come together. And one of the ways we come together is through sharing our treasures -- including jewels like Commonwealth. - Sarah Churchwell.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Patchett's seventh novel (This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, 2013) begins with the opening of a door. Fix Keating expected all the guests, including many fellow cops, who are crowded into his modest Los Angeles home to celebrate his younger daughter Franny's christening, but why is deputy district attorney Bert Cousins, a near-stranger, standing at the threshold clutching a big bottle of gin? As soon as Bert, married and the father of three, with a fourth on the way, meets Fix's stunningly beautiful wife, Beverly, the foundations of both households undergo a tectonic shift. As Patchett's consummately crafted and delectably involving novel unfolds, full measure is subtly taken of the repercussions of the breaking asunder and reassembling of the two families. Anchored in California and Virginia, and slipping gracefully forward in time, the complexly suspenseful plot evolves exponentially as the six kids, thrown into the blender of custody logistics and ignored by the adults, grow close, like a pack of feral dogs, leading to a resounding catastrophe. The survivors grow up and improvise intriguingly unconventional lives, including Franny's involvement with a writer, which raises thorny questions about a novelist's right to expose family secrets. Indeed, this is Patchett's most autobiographical novel, a sharply funny, chilling, entrancing, and profoundly affecting look into one family's commonwealth, its shared affinities, conflicts, loss, and love.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
BOYS AMONG MEN: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution, by Jonathan Abrams. (Three Rivers, $16.) Abrams, a former Grantland writer, profiles the players, both successful and less so, who joined the league directly from high school. Some of the sport's biggest stars followed this path between 1995 and 2005, including Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Kevin Garnett. THE GIRLS, by Emma Cline. (Random House, $17.)When Evie - 14, adriftand overlooked - encounters a group of enviable older girls in the late 1960s, she is soon drawn into a Charles Manson-like cult replete with squalor and sexual abuse. But rather than the group's charismatic leader, the object of Evie's obsession is Suzanne, a woman modeled on a reallife Manson devotee. THE BONJOUR EFFECT: The Secret Codes of French Conversation Revealed, by Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoit Nadeau. (St. Martin's Griffin, $16.99.) As expatriates living in France, the authors learned firsthand the importance of cultural fluency. They approach their subject with anthropological eyes, focusing on the unseen rules that govern French speech: from the layered meanings of non to the art and ritual of dinnertime discussions. ANATOMY OF A SOLDIER, by Harry Parker. (Vintage, $17.) The story of Capt. Tom Barnes, a fictional British soldier in Afghanistan, is told from the perspectives of inanimate objects that surround him: a prosthetic limb, a tourniquet, dog tags. The fragmentary style of the novel suits its subject: Barnes was gravely injured during the conflict. As our reviewer, Benjamin Busch, put it, such narrators are "witness to a single casualty, their multiple perspectives finally forming a gestalt view of a soldier's journey from mutilation to recovery." STREET OF ETERNAL HAPPINESS: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road, by Rob Schmitz. (Broadway, $16.) Schmitz, an NPR correspondent based in China, offers a multigenerational portrait of his neighborhood, a former colonial and expatriate stronghold, using the stories of its residents: a struggling restaurateur, an elderly couple, a migrant worker. COMMONWEALTH, by Ann Patchett. (Harper Perennial, $16.99.) A betrayal - an extramarital kiss at a christening - sets in motion the joining and unraveling of the Keating and Cousins families over the decades, with Patchett's novel following the stepsiblings over 50 years. "In delineating the casual blend of irritation and unsentimental affection among family members of all ages, Patchett excels," our reviewer, Curtis Sittenfeld, wrote.