Commonwealth: A Novel by Ann Patchett (Epub)

Description

One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny’s mother, Beverly—thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.

Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved. Spending summers together in Virginia, the Keating and Cousins children forge a lasting bond that is based on a shared disillusionment with their parents and the strange and genuine affection that grows up between them.

When, in her twenties, Franny begins an affair with the legendary author Leon Posen and tells him about her family, the story of her siblings is no longer hers to control. Their childhood becomes the basis for his wildly successful book, ultimately forcing them to come to terms with their losses, their guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they feel for one another.

Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a meditation on inspiration, interpretation, and the ownership of stories. It is a brilliant and tender tale of the far-reaching ties of love and responsibility that bind us together.

User’s Reviews

Review Praise for Commonwealth: “Patchett brings humanity, humor, and a disarming affection to lovable, struggling characters… Irresistible.” — Library Journal“Exquisite… Commonwealth is impossible to put down.” — New York Times“(A) rich and engrossing new novel …” — New York Times Book Review“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.” — Booklist“…a funny, sad, and ultimately heart-wrenching family portrait…Patchett elegantly manages a varied cast of characters…[Patchett is] at her peak in humor, humanity, and understanding people in challenging situations.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)“The prose is lean and inviting…A satisfying meat-and-potatoes domestic novel from one of our finest writers.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“Wonderfully executed…” — Marie Claire“Commonwealth is a smart, thoughtful novel about the ties that bind us.” — Pop Sugar“Commonwealth is an all-American family saga, but her touching and even-handed approach to themes such as family politics, love, the role of literature and the acidic nature of lies is buoyed by a generous sprinkling of matter-of-fact humor” — BookPage“Commonwealth bursts with keen insights into faithfulness, memory and mortality… [An] ambitious American epic…” — Atlanta Journal-Constitution“Patchett’s storytelling has never seemed more effortlessly graceful. This is minimalism that magically speaks volumes…” — Washington Post“The genius of the way Patchett approached Commonwealth is that it’s constructed like a puzzle… Maybe it’s another case of the tried-and-true adage: “Write what you know.” Because this book? It’s pure gangbusters.” — San Francisco Chronicle“moving, beautifully crafted novel…” — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel“Commonwealth is a sly book about storytelling, a story about a single incident – really two pivotal incidents – spun out over the length of a narrative constructed like a conversation but encompassing decades.” — Kansas City Star“splendid new novel… Just try to stop reading. And you won’t want to. Patchett is in stellar form.” — USA Today“… the emotional intelligence of Patchett’s storytelling here feels warmer and richer and more resonant than anything she’s done before.” Rating: A — Entertainment Weekly“close obervation, deadpan humor… Chekhov regularly invoked” — Wall Street Journal“Patchett gives us funny, flawed characters, and the rich reward of Commonwealth is seeing their lives unfold…” — Houston Chronicle“a wry, compassionate tale” — Christian Science Monitor“…to create a story with 10 protagonists that spans 50 years – and at least five settings spread across the globe – is a balancing act that requires immense narrative skill, and Patchett never falters.” — Knoxville News-Sentinel“Reading Commonwealth is a transporting experience… It feels like Patchett’s most intimate novel and is without doubt one of her best.” — Los Angeles Times“Wonderful… Patchett is a master storyteller” — O, the Oprah Magazine“Spinning ordinary lives into literary gold” — Seattle Times“[A] memorable, modern novel” — Flavorwire“Ann Patchett’s gifts are more clear than ever in Commonwealth” — Dallas Morning News“Patchett’s storytelling here feels warmer and richer and more resonant than anything she’s done before.” — Entertainment Weekly –This text refers to the paperback edition.

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ Are the good reviews lying? Because this was a hot mess of deconstruction that didn’t work…if that was the author’s creative intention. There was not one character…if you could follow the twenty or so introduced in pockets of the book that had little purpose…that was redeeming or that I could care about to want to continue on this literary journey. But, with so many literary accolade from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle, I felt obligated to finish the book. I even preordered wanting to see what all the praise was about. Were they lying too? Yes, yes they were. This book should never have seen the light of say. It was confusing and pointless. I understand what Patchett was trying to accomplish in artistic terms, but in literary terms, it just didn’t work.

⭐ Time is so precious these days, I resent an author who takes the lazy way out and sends her characters on all sorts of irrelevant thought memories to fill the pages. Patchett knows how to write and her other book, State of Wonder is such a marvellously written tale, you can’t help wondering whether this story was delegated to some hapless intern who was told to fill out the pages with “stuff”. I have read and enjoyed Kafka, so lots of detail doesn’t worry me, but this was just padding of the worst sort. Pages and pages explaining how the kids flew from one parent to the other. Pages and pages (and pages) about who should sit with whom on a long car journey. If someone stood talking to you like this, you would run away screaming.In the end, for the first time in years, I gave up. Perhaps if I had persevered something would have popped up in the middle of the book and surprised me – but it seems unlikely and hardly worth the effort. There are so many marvellous books available, why waste your time with something that I suspect the author assembled in a rush.

⭐ It all began with an illicit kiss…. Bert Cousins kissed Beverly Keating at a family christening party, and that set in motion two divorces, a marriage and six kids who get tossed back and forth from the state of California to the commonwealth of Virginia and yet become what one of them later describes as “a fierce little tribe.” This is a family saga with some major twists.In the beginning, I had a lot of trouble keeping the people straight. Who was married to whom, which children were from which set of parents, etc., not to mention all the other people. In addition, the timeline kept jumping back and forth and it wasn’t always obvious. I could have put the book down at any time but I did not as there was something compelling about it even though there is nothing grand about this story, no bells and whistles in the plot or the writing.The story goes back and forth in time, sometimes confusing. I can see how this irritated some reviewers as I never quite knew where the story was going. Still, a pretty good read as Ann Patchett can really tell a story…one that is satisfying and reflects the mess of real life without resorting to tricks. 3.5 Stars

⭐ My primary thought as I read Commonwealth was…..when you have several beautifully written & successful books to your credit editors must be reluctant to use even a metaphoric red pencil. Hence a novel in which even this patient reader became disengaged. Wait! Holly…..Which one is that again? Theresa? Oh, she’s still alive somewhere? Who’s Michael & why is he even in this book?

⭐ I liked it well enough. I didn’t really care about the characters. There are quite a few characters to keep track and some are hardly developed at all. I was expecting more to happen and it didn’t. Something would happen that would be monumental, the chapter would end, and it would be 15 years later and we were seeing the world through someone else’s lens. It was odd – as if the author wanted us to look at that monumental decision with the twenty-twenty vision or the regret of those years, but then I didn’t feel any of that. I just didn’t understand the way the characters coped with the tragedy and the lot that befell them; we weren’t given that much insight into their lives.

⭐ Although this book could have been incredible, I found it tedious. I am not against jumping from the current to the past, but when it is done to the extent that Patchett does in this book, one has trouble figuring out what is happening and why.I saw no need for the story to even include many of the later characters, since they were barely even introduced to the reader; certainly not to the degree to exact interest in them.There were times when I even forgot who some of the characters were because of the jumps in decades or because they had not really been developed.The other thing that bothered me about most of the children’s lives was that they were not even interesting or compelling.

⭐ I felt some uneasiness at the beginning of this book. I wasn’t particularly liking the characters I was meeting and I wasn’t sure just where Ann Patchett was taking me with them. Of course, I shouldn’t have worried.Patchett starts with characters that are perhaps not so lovable, and she reveals them to us incrementally, bit by bit, layer by layer, and as more layers of their humanity are laid bare, a remarkable thing happens. We find that the characters are relatable and even likable. We know these people. They are our neighbors, our family, our friends, ourselves. We end up caring deeply about them and hoping against hope that things will turn out well for them on their complicated journeys through life.The story begins with an uninvited guest at a christening party. The birth of Franny Keating, the second daughter of Beverly and Fix Keating, is being celebrated. Fix is a cop with the LAPD and most of the guests are cops and their wives.But then a lawyer with the DA’s office, Bert Cousins, arrives. He wasn’t invited and only knows Fix slightly. The party had been mentioned to him by one of the invited guests and he decided on his own to just show up. It is a fateful decision that will ultimately change the course of ten lives; two families, six children and two married couples.On that sunny Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins meets Beverly Keating and is instantly attracted to her. Before the day is out, he has kissed her and things will never be the same again.Ultimately, the two marriages break up. Bert marries Beverly and they move to Virginia with Beverly’s two daughters. Bert’s four children stay in California with their mother, even though he tries to convince her that she, too, should move to Virginia.Over the years, the children make cross-country flights in summer to visit their non-custodial parents, and the Keating and Cousins children form their own lasting familial bond. They have a genuine affection for each other that was at first based on their mutual disappointment with their parents but that grew into something real and strong.Then one summer day in Virginia, something terrible happens to the children, something that will haunt them and their parents for the rest of their lives.Many years later, Franny is living in Chicago and working part-time as a waitress. She meets Leon Posen, a famous author whom she admires but who has not written a book in many years. She begins an affair with him and eventually tells him the story of her family. He turns the family story into a best-selling novel and the family tragedy is revealed to the world.In the end, Patchett’s archeological digging through the lives of her characters works brilliantly. All is revealed, sometimes with humor, sometimes with pathos, but always with a tender understanding of the ties that bind us in families and circles of caring. Her book is a wonderful meditation on all of that. I was sorry to see it end.

⭐ Not only is the story in this book compelling, the structure is brilliant. I’m a sucker for a novel with a clever structure that leaves me wondering how the author came up with it.This is the story of 2 families that, through an act of infidelity, are broken apart but only so far. It’s the story of sibling chicanery, loyalty and love. It’s the story of parental chicanery, unintentional ineptitude and love.It is intriguing, captivating and well written- everything I love in a book.I won’t detail the story for you here – plenty of people have done that. I highly recommend not reading those reviews and just reading the book. I did a combo read/listen due to time. Either works but the relationships are complicated so I recommend reading over listening.

⭐ This is an extraordinary book. Like the parts of a mobile, swinging in the air, the characters and themes circle through time and space. There are multiple points of view as we see an insightful examination of family, sibling and step-sibling relationships, and the effects of divorce on children. Patchett is able to get inside all her characters. They all ring true, and even the most dastardly is somewhat sympathetic in the end. How she weaves this all together in a carefully crafted spider’s web, around an always evolving central tragedy, is a sight to be seen. This book should be taught as writer’s craft at it’s best. There is also an interesting secondary theme, which is, what makes art, who has the right to make that art, and who owns their own story. Here again, she is deft at her approach. The multiple closures, as the evolving circles within circles come to rest, are satisfyingly resolved. Terrific and wide spanning novel!

⭐ Read first chapter and it was not very compelling. There seemed to be so many characters introduced that by the time I picked it up to read chapter 2, and my not initially realizing it skipped MANY MANY years ahead in chapter 2, I couldn’t figure out who the characters were. Nothing I was reading was compelling me to neither start over or push ahead. Disappointing. [note: I’m not an avid reader and if I don’t get pulled into a novel pretty early on, it’s a bust for me. Because of this, I try to choose carefully, and this book having received pretty good reader ratings AND presence on the NYTimes best seller list, I thought it was a safe bet.)

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