Commonwealth

Starred review from May 9, 2016
Patchett (State of Wonder) draws from personal experience for a funny, sad, and ultimately heart-wrenching family portrait: a collage of parents, children, stepchildren, siblings, and stepsiblings. In 1960s California, lawyer Bert Cousins divorces Teresa, leaving her to raise their four children alone; Beverly Keating divorces Fix, an L.A. cop; and Bert and Beverly marry and relocate to Virginia with Beverly and Fix’s two children. Visiting arrangements result in an angry, resentful younger generation—rebellious Cal, frustrated Holly, practical Jeannette, littlest Albie, bossy Caroline, kind-hearted Franny—spending part of summer vacations together. Left unsupervised, Cal takes charge, imitating grown-ups by drinking and carrying a gun, until a fatal accident puts an end to shared vacations. Patchett follows the surviving children into adulthood, focusing on Franny, who confides to novelist Leo Posen stories of her childhood, including the secret behind the accident. Twenty years after that conversation, middle-aged with children and stepchildren of their own, Franny and Caroline take 83-year-old Fix to see the movie version of Leo’s novel about their family. Patchett elegantly manages a varied cast of characters as alliances and animosities ebb and flow, cross-country and over time. Scenes of Franny and Leo in the Hamptons and Holly and Teresa at a Zen meditation center show her at her peak in humor, humanity, and understanding people in challenging situations. What’s more challenging, after all, than a family like the Commonwealth of Virginia, made up of separate entities bound together by chance and history?

December 5, 2016
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.

April 1, 2016

In this new novel by the beloved New York Times best-selling Patchett, Bert Cousins arrives uninvited at Franny Keating's christening party, recalling Sleeping Beauty's bad fairy and wreaking just as much havoc. He ends up kissing Franny's mother, Beverly, an act that eventually puts paid to both their marriages and joins the Cousins and Keating children in one big, genuinely affectionate bunch who look askance at their parents. When an adult Franny reveals her family's backstory to famed author Leon Posen, he turns it into a must-read book, which forces the siblings to reevaluate their lives together. With a 500,000-copy first printing and a 22-city tour.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 15, 2016
Two families are fused, atomized, and reconfigured by a stolen kiss, a child's death, and a bestselling novel.In her seventh work of fiction, Patchett (This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, 2013, etc.) turns from the exotic locales and premises of Bel Canto (2001) and State of Wonder (2011) to a subject closer to home: the evolution of an American family over five decades. The story begins on a very hot day in Southern California at a christening party for Beverly and Fix Keating's second daughter, Franny. A lawyer named Bert Cousins shows up uninvited, carrying a bottle of gin. With its help, the instant infatuation he conceives for his stunning hostess becomes "the start of his life." After Bert and Beverly marry and move to Virginia, the six newly minted stepsiblings are dragged unhappily into new relationships and settings. On another hot afternoon, one of the children dies from a bee sting--a tragedy compounded by long-kept secrets and lies. Jumping ahead, we find Franny in her late 20s, having an affair with a Saul Bellow-type novelist 32 years her senior. "Other than the difference in their ages, and the fact that he had an estranged wife, and had written a novel about her family which in its final form made her want to retch even though she had found it nothing less than thrilling when he was working on it, Franny and Leo were great." Since Patchett comes from a blended family with the same outlines as the one in this book, the problems created by Leo's fictionalized family history, also called Commonwealth, are particularly intriguing. The prose is lean and inviting, but the constant shifts in point of view, the peripatetic chronology, and the ever growing cast of characters will keep you on your toes.A satisfying meat-and-potatoes domestic novel from one of our finest writers.

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Starred review from July 1, 2016
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2016

Bert Cousins, a deputy DA in Southern California, takes a break from the claustrophobia of his home (three kids, including a baby, and a pregnant wife) and crashes the christening party for Franny, the baby of Fix Keating, a cop he barely knows. By the end of the day, drunken Bert has kissed Keating's beautiful wife, Beverly, thus setting in motion five decades of the two families reconstituting a time or two. The six children form uneasy bonds with one another and their various imperfect parental figures. Franny unwittingly blows open the heart of these messy alliances when a chance meeting with Leo, a famous, much older author, leads to a long love affair and a betrayal when Leo writes a blockbuster version of Franny's life story, made more raw by the death of one of her stepbrothers. VERDICT Award-winning author Patchett brings humanity, humor, and a disarming affection to lovable, struggling characters who soldier on with decency despite the handicaps of their disrupted childhoods. Irresistible. [See Prepub Alert, 3/7/16.]--Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.