It runs in the family

“The christening party took a turn when Albert Cousins arrived with gin.” Thus starts Ann Patchett’s latest work of fiction, Commonwealth . Even before you have finished the first chapter you know that it isn’t the just the party that takes a turn, but Albert Cousins and that bottle of gin turns everyone’s lives around. The christening is Franny’s, the second daughter of Beverly and Fix Keating. Fix is a policeman and Beverly is a very beautiful woman. Cousins wasn’t even invited to the do, but so desperate was he to get out of his house where his four young children were barely being managed by his harried wife, that he grabs a gift, any gift, and runs towards a party he had overheard being discussed. As the bottle of gin is dutifully opened, and a team forms itself to squeeze fresh orange juice to drink it with, the afternoon party takes on the hazy contours of a wild dream. Wildly enough, it ends with a kiss. Between Albert Cousins and Beverly Keating.

Soon, Albert and Beverly get married and move to Virginia. The six children, now in various sibling permutations, are forced to reconfigure their lives and holidays. A couple of years along, on another hot day, aided by yet another bottle of intoxicant, tragedy befalls the family. Franny grows up, starts dating a famous novelist and the story of her life becomes the story of his book, Commonwealth . These are the pieces Patchett places to then take the reader through several decades of the lives of each of these characters.

In one of her non-fictional essays, ‘How to Read a Christmas Story’ (now part of a collection titled This is the Story of a Happy Marriage), Patchett writes about her parents’ divorce. When she was six, her mother divorced her father and moved her two girls from California to Nashville with her new lover. A year later they married. The husband’s four kids, who continued to live in California, flew without adult supervision every year to spend Christmas with their father and his new family. The details of Patchett’s essay and the living situation of her characters in Commonwealth are so liberally intertwined that it is, but inevitable, that she casts herself in the role of Franny. While fiction that borrows heavily from life is an eternal trope in literature, it is novel in Patchett’s case. And Commonwealth is all the better for it. Who else would know how six young kids — part resentful, entirely sulky — forced together over long vacations would behave better than one who had been there herself.

The children grow up, and added to the regular scars of childhood, is the open wound of the tragedy. Each child sees it differently, some blame others — adults, who are expected to be responsible — while others blame themselves. Through the course of their lives though, what remains is family, no matter how distorted and re-imagined the definition of that word is. The siblings and the step-siblings lose each other and find themselves. And when they have found themselves, they seek each other out again. Despite the fact that the book is weighed down by such a large array of characters — all of them prominent — at no point does the reader fumble. Patchett sketches them in such elegant details that they feel if not like friends, at least people you are more than a little acquainted with.

If there is a central message to Commonwealth , it is that life is ugly, and it is up to each of us to find meaning and beauty in it. That shit happens, but there is no point wallowing in it endlessly. And that, at the end of the day, no matter how complicated it is, family means something. No, not something; that family means a lot. We are all defined by our tragedies, and yet our intrinsic, and instinctive, realisation is that life not only goes on, sometimes it even dazzles.

Nobody comes out looking pretty in this book. Not fathers, not mothers, not world-famous writers. Yet, there are reasons to love all of them. Patchett is a master of setting the mise-en-place of every scene and that, added to how well etched each of the characters are, makes Commonwealth a delight to read. Even bottles of gin and whisky appear so often at important points in the book that they could be characters themselves.

In her essays, Patchett has written about how she always wanted to be an author, she had no other ambition growing up. It is, therefore, certain that she assigned herself the role of the third party observer while still young. Perhaps Commonwealth was the book she was writing all along, and in giving Franny the exact life circumstances that she herself had, Patchett provides the book and its narrative an eye so sharp that it is near flawless. Commonwealth is the work of an excellent writer at the top of her game. Even if you have never read Ann Patchett before, go straight to this one. You can thank me later.