Review: ‘Commonwealth’

Novelists frequently are asked about the level of biography in their books. Is a novel a thinly veiled biography? What about the other characters? Are those people you know? Your family? Your friends? Have you had to apologize to anyone for the way they are portrayed - or they think they are portrayed - in your book?

Ann Patchett, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tenn., and an acclaimed writer of fiction and non-fiction, imagines a spin on those questions in her new novel 'Commonwealth.”

Patchett's book explores this question: What if you shared the story of your troubled family with a famed writer trying to work his way out of a dry spell? What if your story became, literally and

literarily, his story?

It's an interesting setup, but what makes it work as beautifully as it does is Patchett's approach to the tale. Readers are taken back and forth in time, first witnessing the moment when a marriage starts to dissolve and another is foreshadowed. From there, we encounter the central characters at various moments in their lives, each of which is a turning point. The non-sequential narrative provides a layer of mystery to the proceedings even as each moment is delineated with a combination of empathy and clarity.

Here, Patchett gives us Franny, a woman in love with a much older writer who has used her life as the template for his book: 'Other than the difference in their ages, and the fact he had an estranged wife, and had written a novel about her family which in its final form made her want to retch even though she had found it nothing less than thrilling when he was working on it, Franny and Leo were great. And it wasn't as if she begrudged him the novel, it was a brilliant novel, it was the brilliant work of Leon Posen which she had brought down on herself.”

In 'Commonwealth,” Patchett reveals how what we want most also might be what we want least once we have it and see the consequences of our longing. Her characters' lives are vivid, complex and filled with contradiction and struggle. 'Commonwealth” is an outstanding novel.