Imagine a gatecrasher comes to your party uninvited and he ends up 'stealing' your wife. Stealing
is clearly not the right word as you cannot steal a person. As it so happens, the uninvited guest steals a moment
with the hostess and the demographic of two different families have to be reconfigured.
Commonwealth written
by Ann Patchett is about
children growing up in a blended family.
The book opens in 1960s Los
Angeles.
Fix Keating does
not know who Bert Cousins is when he shows up at his younger daughter’s
christening party. Fix is a local cop while Bert is a lawyer in the Los Angeles
district attorney’s office. Although they barely know each other, Cousins goes
to the christening party to escape from
howling kids and his pregnant wife , Teresa. He arrives with gin at the
christening party and ends up kissing Beverly Keating when he is totally drunk
on gin and orange juice. They divorce their spouses and move from California to
Virginia. Consequently the six kids from their previous marriages end up
shuttling from coast to coast every summer. As we follow the Keating and
Cousins children, their stories come into focus. Bert has Cal , Holly, Jeanette and Albie while Fix has
Caroline and Franny.
In her 20s,
Franny Keating has an affair with Leo Posen, a famous writer who ends up
writing a best seller based on Franny’s stories about growing up with her siblings.
The story spans
five decades and it is like a jigsaw puzzle, the readers get to piece together
the story from fragmented memories of the Keating girls and the Cousins
children.
‘But
Caroline and Franny were not glad they were home. They were not glad at all. It
was in this battered state that the Keating girls returned to Arlington to be
reunited with their step siblings.
Holly
was certainly friendly. She hopped up and down and actually clapped her hands
when the girls came through the door. She said she wanted to put on another
dance recital in the living room this summer. But Holly was also wearing
Caroline’s red T-shirt with the tiny white ribbon rosette at the neck, which
her mother had made Caroline put in the Goodwill bag before she left because it
was both faded and too small. Holly was not the Goodwill.'
ALMOST TWO
WEEKS after Franny had so
miraculously deduced that Leo Posen’s room number was 821, and had gotten him
to that room and gotten herself out of the hotel without anyone’s being the
wiser, she got a phone call at the bar. Ten minutes past six and every table
was full, every barstool taken .People stacked up behind the people in the
chairs , drinks in hand , laughing and talking too loudly while hoping that a
seat would open up. One of the other waitresses, the girl named Kelly who had
the ex-husband and the child , put her hand on the small of Franny’s back and
nearly touched her lipsticked lips to Franny’s ear while whispering to her .
Everything these people did was intimate, even the delivery of messages. “
Phone call,” she said, her voice slipping beneath the din.
Though it is an
ordinary tale about ordinary people, Ann Patchett click is good in painting characters
and in her subtlety , it shows that nobody is completely bad and the characters
evolve as they age. Through the female characters, she aptly
conveys how a woman’s hopes about
life have been slowly dashed in middle-age. She is insightful and humorous in her eloquent narrative.
Often there may
be bitter rivalry between siblings, they do share a common past where they each
remember things differently. If they could just grow out of the sibling
rivalry and let go of the memories of the past that hurt them , they might find a deep bond in their shared past.
I first read Ann Patchett's memoir " This is the story of a Happy Marriage". She writes with such ease in capturing small moments in life just like how she tells the story in Commonwealth.
click
I first read Ann Patchett's memoir " This is the story of a Happy Marriage". She writes with such ease in capturing small moments in life just like how she tells the story in Commonwealth.
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