The novelist, Leon Posen, grappling with middle age, writer’s block and alimony, includes both Franny and her story into his life. Years later, Franny, the pretty baby whose christening party sets off the story, tells the story of her family to a famous novelist. The parents, grappling with the havoc and splinters in their lives, are blissfully unaware of the escapades of the children until a tragic incident occurs and binds them all in a circle of guilt and deception.
They learn to get away on their own, “they did things, real things, and they never got caught”. They hated them.” As they are forced to endure living together, the children form their own cliques. The six children are held together with a common bond, “…they disliked the parents. Keating’s emotions in having to cope with six children, two of her own and four from her husband’s previous marriage, are expressed in brutal clarity, “There was no place to go, no place to get away from them…She thought about the fact that if she were in the garage rather than the carport, she’d be killing herself right now.” Patchett’s writing is, as always, in equal parts honest and compassionate.
Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth traces the trajectory of this affair as it tears apart the families, and the children end up traveling from one set of the broken family to the other, newer, one.
Albert Cousins kisses the host’s wife, Beverly Keating, and sets in motion a love affair. That summer night and the party fuelled by gin (plenty of it) turns out to be a turning point in the lives of these two families. A novel that starts with the line, “The christening party took a turn when Albert Cousins arrived with gin.”
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