Commonwealth

My mother and I stooped over the sink and scooped viscid, shiny seeds out of the thin waxy shell of a passionfruit plucked from the dusty brick stoop of our neighbor’s house. Blindingly acidic, a whispered sweetness at the end. My father and I walked in the middle of the road with the dog underneath a glowing, phosphorescent pink sky. Like a bright beam of unbridled energy smarting across the glossy, dark inside of my mouth. My mother and I stood in the frothy cool of the Pacific, clouds of flies rising around briny clumps of drying kelp, pungent on the wet sand. The prickle up the inside of my cheeks. My father and I slid down a dusty, treacherous Hollywood trail, air humming, thick with heat even in the morning. The crackle as molar met brittle black seed, splintering into fragments. My brother and I stood in the full light of the setting, golden sun on the golf course, sticky and burning, watching the light stretch, melt, watching the hawks and the coyotes, waiting. Like the last moments of summer flashing across my tongue, fleeting, sparkling, unimaginably precious.

Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth is an expansive, sun-soaked family epic spanning three generations and many decades, leaping from Los Angeles backyards and Chicago bars to Amagansett docks and New York apartments. Rendering the complicated family-but-not-but-yes dynamic between people like the Cousins and the Keatings and the six children between them (Cal, Caroline, Holly, Jeanette, Franny, and Albie) is an ambitious premise, but Patchett succeeds with abundant empathy, wit, and warmth. While the entire story is heavy with loss — Cal’s early death, the torturous illnesses of Teresa Cousins and Fix Keating, the disfiguration of the family’s story to novelist Leon Posen — it is lightened with love in equal measures. What lingers long after the final page is not how much has been left behind but how much has been gained, how much there is to remember: the aching squeeze of affection for a mother or a brother or a father, the painful, exposing realization that Bert Cousins has in the first few pages of the novel, that "there wasn’t as much time as you thought there was going to be.” There never is.

Central to the novel is adulthood and childhood, the stretch and slippage between these two shapes that we move through in a lifetime. Patchett’s narrative structure, which throws away any sense of linearity and chronology, coupled with a knowing and kindly speaker who slides fluidly through the subliminals of a sprawling cast of deeply flawed characters, reinforces the persistent feeling of time collapsing into itself, the past and present becoming translucent shades on top of eachother. Teresa Cousins’ remembrance of Cal near the end of her life is a manifestation of the poignant, quiet collisions of time and space which are the very essence of Commonwealth: “He is fifteen and ten and five. He is an instant. He is flying back to her. He is hers again. She feels the weight of him in her chest as he comes into her arms. He is her son, her beloved child, and she takes him back.”

The perspective Patchett permits the reader to assume as the novel backtracks, skips forwards, hones in and pulls back out through the good and the bad, is valuable for its unfolding of what real life feels like, which is a disarranged accumulation of moments of loss and love. The ending chapters only confirm this sensation, as Teresa, on a stay with Holly in a remote Switzerland hippie retreat camp, considers the forms her daughter has inhabited from birth: “She put her arm around Holly’s waist and thought of her body as something she’d made, something that was so completely separate from her now.” Here, Patchett gently reminds us that what we love and lose somehow always comes back, even if in thought and memory only.

Another summer’s end. My father and I stood outside in the cooling night air and watched Jupiter twinkle faintly, bemusedly, next to a glowing moon, the very edge of it fading into dusty shadow. I think of the instant. My mother and I leaned against each other, suddenly very tired, in line at a crowded, hip restaurant, the noise of the diners and the bass thudding from the speakers fading into a murmur. I think of the miracle that is family, of sharing my name and my blood, the throughline from me to them, from before time and after. My brother and I embraced in the middle of his crowded and messy room, clean laundry and memoirs strewn across the floor, his calloused hand patting the small of my back awkwardly, sweetly. I think of Franny and Albie as teenagers on a winter night sharing a weary, loving moment, and Franny as an adult, holding fast: “Now she understood that at some point far out in the future there would be a night just like tonight, and she would remember this story and know that no one else in the world knew it had happened except Albie. She had needed to keep something for herself.”

Cover: Detail of "Untitled (Oranges in Tissue with Vase)" by Alberta Binford McCloskey