They say that a novelist writes best when dipping deep into her own life. Incidents that one cannot forget but stay like scar tissue somewhere inside one’s head have unfailingly inspired memorable fiction. Since this is the first Patchett novel I have read, I cannot say whether her earlier novels mirror some aspect of her life but, like Franny (a deliberate name chosen to evoke Salinger?) in this one, her parents were also divorced when she was a child, she too had a policeman father, and she also moved from Los Angeles to another part of the U.S. where she grew to adulthood. In a conversation with her writer friend Elizabeth Gilbert ( Eat, Love, Pray and The Signature of All Things ), Ann Patchett reveals how the act of writing for her is a sort of therapy to overcome emotional pain by putting it all into a book and creating a distance for herself from an open wound.
It is wrong to assume that this sprawling tale, of two families and many lives, is in any way a reflection of her own. But, often, when reading some poignant episodes, one gets the feeling that the emotions she describes so vividly come from a known source. In an age when icing is clumsily lathered on to hide a glaring lack of cake, Patchett’s Commonwealth is an interesting exception precisely because it is about a large complicated family group with many sets of parents, siblings and step-siblings and locations. In fact, it has so many characters and so many siblings and step-siblings that the reader is in danger of getting confused. Naturally, there are a multitude of stories that need to be told and many years of happiness and pain to go through. Patchett negotiates these with confidence and skill.
Her story starts with a christening, in the early 1960s, on a hot and humid afternoon in Los Angeles. Neighbours, friends and acquaintances, mothers, grandmothers, fathers and pesky children tumble in and out of a house, drinking freshly squeezed orange juice and gin, chasing an ever-disappearing pile of sandwiches and melting ice cubes. The hostess is an incredibly beautiful blonde and in walks a handsome neighbour. A spark lit that afternoon between her and this lawyer neighbour grows rapidly into a full-fledged affair and a divorce, followed by their relocating to Virginia, leaving two cuckolded spouses and six children to deal with the altered relationships over the next 30 odd years.
Free of orthodox parental control, the children form a sort of commonwealth where they collectively take decisions and stay out of the dysfunctional adult lives of their parents. However, a tragic death alters this idyllic childhood leaving everyone to deal with it in separate ways. One child goes on to become a lawyer, another drops out of law to become a barmaid and then moves in with a Saul Bellow-like alcoholic writer, only to give up the crazy life and marry an Indian widower with two children. Another one chucks everything to join a Buddhist meditation centre in a remote village in the Swiss Alps, while one joins a dangerous cycle gang, sets fire to his school, and resurfaces years later as a lost soul to be taken in by his step-sister.
Apart from the absorbing rollercoaster ride that we take with the characters (occasionally losing track of names and places), we also travel the course of the American life through the last five-odd decades and try and figure out whether there is a method in this free-fall that many young Americans consider a rite of passage into adulthood. It’s all there: love and tenderness, betrayal and infidelity, cruelty and indifference, drugs, hedonism and alcoholism, ending (predictably?) with veganism, Buddhism and New Age emotional implosions… in short, the full range of Americana. Interestingly, it all comes to a resolution at a gala Christmas party thrown by the same blonde (now with another husband, another set of step-children), and the estranged partners reunite in strange ways. How else could it have ended if not like this?
Beauty and ugliness run a race with each other through this saga and at a certain point the reader begins to lose individual characters in the game of snakes and ladders that the five surviving children play between themselves.
Towards the end, the author skilfully gathers these tangles and starts to reknit them together. Sisters who have long endured sibling rivalries and fought bitter battles over individual control, the exile who disappears into the blue and returns silently one night to seamlessly merge into the childhood memories he has never been able to erase, the parents who are now old and lonely and in need of care — all these become like the collective responsibility of the old child-gang of the tearaways. Finally, deaths are balanced by new beginnings and, in the tradition of the best childhood memories, only the happy times are remembered by all. A moving and clever novel by an author I was happy to discover.
Commonwealth; Ann Patchett, Bloomsbury India, Rs. 499.
Ira Pande is a writer and freelance editor based in Delhi.
