This is the first chapter, and it is so accomplished. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny’s mother, Beverlythus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families. The fatal moment comes with the glimpse of a beautiful face in the crowd. One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited. Personalities begin to emerge from the scrum of guests, and it becomes obvious that a couple of marriages are not working. The cast continues to drift in and out of frame as the author pans through the living room, the kitchen, the backyard, providing a glimpse into the mores of 1960s Irish Catholic Los Angelenos. Patchett ultimately wins the reader over with her perceptive qualities, alluring characters and undertone of humour. Patchett establishes characters through the timbre of their interior monologues and their attitudes to others.

With his recognition of attorney Bert Cousins, the angle widens to include the baby's mother, Beverly, and 'neighbours and friends and people from church and Beverly's sister and all his brothers and their parents and practically an entire precinct worth of cops'. Fix Keating, father of baby Franny, struggles to place the fellow standing on his porch. Her utilisation of multiple voices and viewpoints now appears effortless.Ĭommonwealth begins with a christening party and a figure framed in a doorway.

After Bel Canto (2001) won the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, Patchett admitted with unwonted modesty that she had previously tried writing in the omniscient third person but had always failed. Patchett applies the same rules of engagement to this suburban milieu as she did to Bel Canto's far more extreme hostage crisis situation. To the contrary, it is a deft rendering of complex interfamilial relationships, filled as much with misunderstandings and drama as with reconciliations and humour. This is at the crux of Ann Patchett's seventh novel, but Commonwealth is not a maudlin, grief-stricken ramble through divorce and disaster. Teresa Cousins acknowledges that life is also other, better things, but that it is the losses that define us – 'as solid and dependable as the earth itself'. Ann Patchett is the author of six novels and three works of non-fiction. Life, one of Commonwealth's minor characters remarks, is a series of losses. You miss the characters once its over Evening Standard Commonwealth is full of.

Commonwealth ann patchett characters