Ann Patchett’s ‘Commonwealth’ is a dizzily unplotted novel that teaches you to live magnanimously

In the summer of 1992, writer Ann Patchett – two times winner of the Orange Prize – decided to follow in her father’s footsteps and join the Los Angeles Police Department. Her first novel, The Patron Saint for Liars, had just been published, and she was in the middle of the prestigious year-long Bunting Fellowship for writers, artists and scholars at Radcliffe College. She was visiting her father a month after the infamous Rodney King incident had irretrievably maligned the LAPD in national and international media – the same LAPD where her father had spent three decades working and which had formed a pleasant if persistent backdrop to the entire duration as it were of her childhood and youth.

Police Academy

Over the course of gin and tonics one evening, in her father’s den at Glendale, about twenty miles away from the scene of the riots, Patchett, like novelists are wont to, mid-conversation, apropos of nothing, announces she wants to write a book around the LAPD. Non-fiction. Something that will wonder aloud, among other things, why people are still queuing up to join the LAPD, in view of its current crisis.

Somehow or the other, exactly as novelists are wont to, she ends up committing to the moment and promises her (thrilled) father that she will take the exam later that year and go into the Police Academy. After all, novelists have done far more difficult things in the name of research. She will not be a police-officer, of course not, she’s a writer – but it will be necessary and unique research for a necessary and unique book. She is thirty.

If you’ve read Patchett’s non-fiction (Truth and Beauty and This is the Story of A Happy Marriage), you might remember exactly how disciplined and sensible she is – I read her The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing And Life every time I need to remind myself that writers need not be tormented critters banging their heads against walls, real and metaphorical, all the livelong day – and she brings this sensible, disciplined approach to preparing for the police academy exam.

Back in Boston from Los Angeles, she swims in the Blodgett Pool until she is about to sink, runs endless miles by the Charles river, exercises at the crack of dawn, and chooses the wall of the Harvard Divinity School to practise jumping over, at night. As for the other components of the examination, she realises, her father has been preparing her for it all these years.

Several months later, over the course of a two-day-long test, including numerous gruelling tasks that might seem impossible for other writers to even conceptualise and various attempts to explain her unconventional employment history (“So you just sit down to write… No one tells you what to do, you pick all that out yourself?”), Patchett qualifies for the Police Academy. (In fact, in the oral exam she gets a record hundred.) However, when her father realises that she has not really changed her position – it is the book she wants out of it and not the policing – he suggests, gently, that perhaps she should then let her seat be taken by someone who is as passionate about being a police officer as he had been.

All things considered, Patchett is in agreement – in any case he would not be comfortable with her revealing too much about the LAPD either – and she returns to writing her beautifully crafted novels. The book about cops is forgotten along the way.

Taft (1994), her second novel, is about a black jazz musician; The Magician’s Assistant (1998) is about a gay magician and her assistant; her breakout novel, Bel Canto (2001), is about a soprano singer who encounters a hostage situation at a performance in the home of a renowned businessman in South America; Run (2007) is about the politics of race, class and home; and her latest, critically acclaimed State of Wonder (2011) is about scientists researching a deeply valuable drug in the Amazon river basin.

It is only in the opening chapter of Patchett’s stirring new novel, Commonwealth, published twenty-five years after she took the Police Academy exam, that you finally find the cops.

Commonwealth

The novel opens in a suburban house in Los Angeles, in the early sixties. Fix (Francis) Keating, a cop about to make detective, is hosting a christening party for his younger daughter Franny. And unlike other Patchett novels, which are a little slow to soar, this one gets you at hello. Consider the first lines:

The christening party took a turn when Albert Cousins arrived with gin. Fix was smiling when he opened the door and he kept smiling as he struggled to make the connection: it was Albert Cousins from the District Attorney’s office standing on the cement slab of his front porch. He’d opened the door twenty times in the last half hour – to neighbours and friends and people from church and Beverly’s sister and all his brothers and their parents and practically an entire precinct worth of cops – but Cousins was the only surprise.

The gin introduces a note of wanton surprise in the afternoon – most people brought proper Catholic christening doodads for the baby. Soon it becomes apparent that this is the day when the lives of the Keatings – Fix and Beverly, and their two daughters, Caroline and Franny (whom we meet) and the Cousins (of whom we meet only Bert, but through him we get to imagine Teresa and their three and three-quarters children, Cal, Holly, Jeanette and the yet unnamed Albie) will change forever. This is the day when Bert Cousins, deputy DA, in a house filled with cops, falls in love with a cop’s wife, telling himself that “he had known from the first minute he saw her, from when she leaned out the kitchen door and called for her husband”, that his meeting with Beverly Keating is the authentic “start of his life”.

Truth and Memory

After a lifetime of writing novels that are “made-up stuff” in spite of the emotional life they borrow from their author (Patchett once said, “I used to take a great deal of pride in the fact that people who read my novels, even all of my novels, wouldn’t really know anything more about me or my life at the end of them than they had known when they started.”), she has finally written a book that draws heavily from her own life in their details. Ann Patchett is the fictional other of Franny Keating.

When Patchett was very young, a couple of years older than Franny, give or take, her parents divorced. While her cop father remained in Los Angeles, Patchett’s mother (novelist Jeanne Ray), daughters in tow, followed the man who was to become her second husband to Nashville (in the book Nashville becomes Arlington, in the Commonwealth of Virginia, a little nugget which gives the book its title, via a sexually charged moment between Franny and her much older lover, the famous writer Leon Posen).

Her step-father’s four children stayed on in Los Angeles with their mother, but every holiday they flew to Nashville and the six children – and two adults – of the reconfigured family attempted to deal with their new family members under the hothouse circumstances that holidays invariably generate:

Here was the most remarkable thing about the Keating children and the Cousins children: they did not hate one another, nor did they possess one shred of tribal loyalty. The Cousinses did not prefer the company of Cousinses and the two Keatings could have done without each other entirely. The four girls were angry together into a single room but they didn’t blame each other. The boys, who were always angry about everything, didn’t seem to care they were in the company of so many girls. The six children held in common one overarching principle that cast their potential dislike for one another down to the bottom of the minor leagues: they disliked the parents.

At the core of Commonwealth is this story: the strange and fascinating consequences of divorce and its aftermath in the modern American family as the baby boomer generation literally attempts the pursuit of happiness in the (complicated) bliss of ’burbia, soured only by the question of alimony. And then, as surely as Patchett’s novels rise sharply from incidents to ideas – it then asks, in the criss-crossed history that follows, who owns the rights to which version of the narrative?

Structure

Because Patchett is a masterly writer – and wisely waited for her craft to ripen to perfection before telling the story of her own family instead of smooshing it all in, in the very first novel, like most debut writers do – the result is dazzling. For one, Commonwealth has not been structured as a vast domestic epic. For another, there is a book called Commonwealth – later made into an eponymous film – within the book, written by Leon Posen, with whom Franny has her grand love affair (which in some ways mirrors her mother’s grand love affair) based on the stories that Franny has told him about her family. Except, the stories were a common bequest – not only Franny’s to give away. It is wonderfully self-reflexive, almost as though Patchett questions the act of transmuting memory to fiction, even as she does it.

Instead of a five-hundred-page domestic epic, what Patchett has done (much like Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni in Before We Visit the Goddess or Rachel Cusk in The Lucky Ones) is to fly a helicopter over five decades, and scope in her camera to key moments. But once focussed upon, the camera records, in lush detail, the exquisite nuances of specific epiphany, it records the micro in such a sophisticated dance of light and shade that you forget the sweep and the cast of the macro altogether. Hundreds of miles on air are followed by days and months digging to the roots.

Sometimes the micro-story is of an afternoon or a day; on occasions, it compresses the events of a season, a year or more. But, essentially, they are nine inter-connected short stories, collected from over the five decades, strung in no particular order. So, after the dramatic afternoon of 1963 when Bert Cousins fell in love with Fix Keating’s glamorous wife Beverly in “One”, we come to “Two”. Fix Keating is in his eighties and is accompanied to the hospital by his beloved Franny, who is now in her fifties. Not only is all the hurly burly done and dusted, but we also learn that Beverly and Bert’s grand affair too ended in divorce.

Embedded along the delicious narrative that unfurls like a Sunday afternoon, slow and long, there are family tragedies and dark secrets viewed from the perspectives of different injured parties, often not cognisant of the future. The future, after all, is known only to the reader.

That is the chief delight of this book. In this season of awful viruses and border skirmishes, this mellow book is exactly what the doctor ordered. If you’ve learnt to expect virtuosity in plot construction and robust examination of ideas in Ann Patchett’s writing, you shall discover, with a sudden peal of delight, that with a leaner book that chiefly instructs you to live magnanimously – for life shall dissolve all to air – she succeeds so supremely in this dizzily unplotted book, perhaps because she has, audaciously, summed up the wisdom of her entire novel-writing career into a beautiful truism: plot is but the memory of time.

A charming read, Commonwealth will transport you to a time before Facebook and Whatsapp, and make you want you to write letters to old friends and lovers, and badger your parents, on the phone, at odd hours for details of half-heard family stories.

Commonwealth, Ann Patchett, Bloomsbury