Though she wrote candidly about her matrimonial qualms in “ This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage,” her 2013 nonfiction collection, she had held off drawing directly from family experience in her novels. Patchett is no stranger to blended families.
Tolerating someone else’s is harder by a coefficient of 10. But a far more common form of involuntary companionship - which doesn’t involve guns but often feels like it does - is the blended family.
This theme found its fullest expression in her 2001 best seller, Bel Canto, whose glamorous characters were taken hostage at a birthday party. Patchett has long explored the awkwardness, pain and grace that come when total strangers are forced into unexpected alliances. Much happens during those sweltering, feral months, some of it exhilarating, some of it unbearable: One of Bert’s children dies. Bert’s four kids come and visit every summer. It doesn’t take long for Bert and Beverly to run off to Virginia together, her two little girls in tow. Nor is it the only act of indecency he’ll commit: By party’s end, Bert has kissed Beverly, Fix’s wife. Alcohol is an obviously indecent gift for him to bring on such a sacred occasion, but he offers it to the baby’s father, Fix, without a dram of embarrassment. He’s self-important, entitled - a man whose fate has been overdetermined by his stupefying good looks. The fellow bearing this bottle, Bert Cousins, is a deputy district attorney who has crashed a christening party in Torrance, Calif., to escape his own squalling brood (three little ones, a fourth on the way). Its contents will dissolve an entire family. “Commonwealth,” Ann Patchett’s exquisite new novel, opens with one man handing a bottle of gin to another.
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