Commonwealth

“Cousins’s arm was weightless now and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one bit.”

Bert Cousins flees the burdens of his large and growing family, with all of their needs and desires. Ironically, he wants the burden of this other child, Franny, a child that is not his own. He can’t help but be struck by her beauty, which reminds him of her mother. Fifty years later, after having both married and divorced her mother, he still feels close to Franny, who always brought him joy, even as a baby.

“They went into the large, sunny room where the patients lay tilted back in recliners, tethered to trickling streams of chemicals.”

The image of the patients, gathered together and tethered to their chemotherapy cocktails, is ironically juxtaposed against the previous chapter, with its intoxicated guests gathered together at the Keating house, imbibing gin and freshly squeezed orange juice cocktails. This contrast starkly highlights the changes that have occurred in the fifty years that separate Chapter 1 from Chapter 2.

“Fix was old and sick, but he remembered everything. Keep examining the witness—that’s what he had told her over the phone when she was a kid and her ID bracelet had gone missing from her locker.”

Ironically, Fix provides a type of writer’s advice when he advises Franny to find the person who stole her ID bracelet. He says to keep interrogating the witnesses, returning to their story to find holes and discrepancies, saying that the only way to find the truth is to revisit the story. While Leo claims that his stories come from his imagination, it’s clear that he too was interrogating, not so much his imagination, but Franny’s memories, as he asks her over and over about the details of her past.

“The picture in his mind—his partner at the dinner table holding Franny, Beverly in the kitchen dressed like she was going out to dinner instead of making dinner—that was enough to make the decisions to keep his eyes closed, but then he felt a single, electric jolt run through his esophagus, as if the poison coursing through him had suddenly washed against the side of the tumor, and Fix remembered again what he was constantly forgetting: this was going to kill him.”

Fix has a “fixed” point of view of the good old days when everything was, according to his ideas, in its proper place. His long-deceased friend Lomer (who was “definitely not gay,” according to Fix, despite Franny’s suggestions) was seated at his kitchen table, and his wife, dressed up (in contrast to his daughter, who, though pretty, refused to dress up), was making dinner. In this way, Fix hearkens Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, dreaming of a rosy past that may or may not exist. Before he can enjoy the image for long, the chemotherapy jolts him viciously back to reality.

“When Teresa was told that she had lost summers, she made a point to curse and weep, but she wondered silently if she hadn’t just been handed the divorce equivalent of a Caribbean vacation. She loved her children, there was no doubt about that, but she could see that one season out of four spent without having to deal with every sore throat and fistfight, the begging for ballet classes she couldn’t afford and didn’t have the time to drive to, the constant excuses made at work for being late and leaving early when she was just hanging on by a fingernail anyway, one season every year without her children, though she would never admit it, might be manageable.”

Teresa loves her children, and all of her daily hard work at her job and at home is for them, to ensure their ability to thrive. When her ex-husband Bert wins summer custody over the children, although she professes to be upset, she secretly marvels at her good fortune. As much as she loves her children, she feels the great burden of each one of their needs and demands, and she looks forward to having some time for herself. Even better, she greatly enjoys the idea that beautiful non-working Beverly will be forced to deal with the burden of caring for her children.

“The parents seemed not to notice the swimsuits, the sunburns, the mosquito bites. The Cousins children and the Keating children smiled up with beatific forgiveness. They had done everything they had wanted to do, they had had the most wonderful day, and no one even knew they were gone. It was like that for the rest of the summer.”

The children have united in their hatred for their parents, while their parents have cocooned themselves from their children in their motel room. The children decide to head out on their own, all day, walking to the lake by themselves, taking a bottle of gin and Bert’s gun with them, drugging Albie with Benadryl and leaving him passed out in the fields while they swim in the lake farther than their parents would ever have let them, steal sweets from the bait store, and learn to fish from strangers while getting sunburned and bitten by mosquitoes. Their parents have no idea what their children are up to; they assume they’ve been safe inside all day, so they treat them to pizza and movies.

“Franny was shaping the story in her head even as he was sitting in front of her. She was thinking of how she would pull out her copies of First City and Septimus Porter as soon as she got home. She would go back over the parts she had underlined in college and read them again. Then she would wake Kumar up and tell him she had talked to Leon Posen in the bar, and how he had asked her about her shoes. Kumar, who was a genius when it came to not being interested in anything, would want to hear every detail, and when she was finished he would tell her to start again. Even as it was happening, she knew that the story of meeting Leon Posen at the Palmer House was one she was going to tell for a long time.”

Although Franny professes to not to be a writer, she thinks like a writer, as she recreates her situation into the perfect story, making sure to include all of the detail necessary to bring the story to life. She recreates the story of her meeting Leon Posen (even as he is sitting right there), a story that she hopes to later tell her roommate Kumar: a story that she hopes will eventually change her life forever.

“It wasn’t that she wanted to ask him about the books, or what he had been doing with himself since the publication of Septimus Porter twelve years ago. She had no intention of spoiling his night. It was that she could see her own life very clearly standing there in front of him, and her life was boring and hard. Going to law school had been a terrible error in judgment that she had made in hopes of pleasing other people, and because of that error in judgment she was in debt like some sort of Dickens character, like the kind of person who sound up on the Oprah show weeping, without a single skill to show for it, when into the bar of the Palmer House came Leon Posen.”

Meeting Leo allows Franny clarity in understanding her own life. She realizes that one reason she has struggled to find purpose is that she spends so much of her time trying to placate others and make them happy. She goes to law school because that’s what her father, stepfather, and sister want, not Franny. Leo’s presence makes her realize the consequences of that decision.

“She looked at her brother instead. He was an exaggeration of her: taller, thinner, darker. She wouldn’t have said they were too much alike except when compared to the West Africans in the living room. Funny to think of someone in the apartment looking like her when Dayo looked like no one but his father and babysitter. When Bintou met her at the door at night, Dayo bound to her chest ingeniously with yards of bright-yellow cloth, Jeanette couldn’t help but think, Really? This is my son?”

This book interrogates the nature of family and the familiar. While the extended family of step-siblings and step-parents sometimes strains the definition of family and who is familiar, Jeanette’s son, who looks nothing like her, sometimes triggers for her a sense of the unfamiliar despite their blood ties. When Albie, who has been gone for so long and now looks so different and unfamiliar returns, she can see how others would see their kinship instantly, which had been hard for her to see at first.

“Albie, of course, moved back later for a single, disastrous school year after the fire, and Holly went back for two nights as an adult in an attempt to measure just how much peace and forgiveness she had mastered through the dharma, but Jeanette wrote off both the state and its residents, including, but not limited to, her father, both sets of grandparents, her uncles and aunts, a handful of first cousins, her stepmother, and her two stepsisters. Goodbye to all that. She hunkered down with what she considered to be her real family: Teresa, Holly, and Albie—the three people who were with her in the house in Torrance when she brushed her teeth at night.”

Cal’s death resulted in the end of the summertime blended families; for the most part, the family members stay on their respective coasts. For Jeanette, the loss of her brother results in her fear of losing the rest of her family. She focuses solely on holding tight to her “real family”—the family she sees daily. She is happy to share a room with her sister, watching her sleep to make sure she is still breathing. The death of one of them focuses her on the more on the survival of the rest of them. Ironically, she is the only one to move across the country to the east coast to raise her own family.

“‘My brother,’ he said, ‘listen to me, I want to tell you, you will stay here with us. A week, a year, the rest of your life, as long as you need to be here, we welcome you.’”

Growing up, Albie has always been treated as a burden—a problem for someone to deal with, whether for his parents, his siblings, or step-siblings. When he arrives in Brooklyn to stay with his sister and brother-in-law Fodé, who Albie has never met before, Fodé is immediately welcoming, warmly embracing him as a brother. While Albie at first is overwhelmed by this demonstration of affection, later, after he gets a job and starts to settle into the rhythms of family, he marvels at the idea that there could be countless other families also used to living in such loving family structures.

“There were six cardboard boxes on the long wooden table in the kitchen, a half a dozen ears of corn still in their green sleeves. The heard the sound of scratching, and then one of the boxes jerked abruptly forward.”

The trapped lobsters serve as a metaphor for Franny, who feels trapped in the guest house with the rude and hypocritical house guests, who are seemingly unaware of how difficult they are being. When Franny hears their scratching, she realizes she must free them. She soon realizes that she must free herself as well.

“‘It isn’t your life,” Leo said. ‘That’s what I’m trying to explain. It’s my imagination.’”

Leo insists on the power and authority of his imagination for the success of his novel Commonwealth. He fails repeatedly to give credit to Franny, Albie, and the rest of her family whom he has mined for material. This insistence on his imagination becomes absurd when Albie rightfully claims that the book tells the story of his own life.

“He moved along the edges of the screen, picking up the children’s dishes as she cut a line through the center of the kitchen. […] ‘Enough,’ Fix howled.”

The cinematic version of their lives proves both familiar and unfamiliar in many ways. Fix is shocked at the idea that his family’s story can prove so different from his own understanding of his reality, especially at the idea that he can be made to seem so insignificant and peripheral in his own life.

“At Christmas he sent his mother a plane ticket so that she could come and sit around a tree with him and his daughter and his wife. Sometimes the popcorn and the fireplace and the endless hands of Go Fish would overwhelm her and she would have to excuse herself and go to the bathroom just to stand beside the sink for a minute and cry. Afterwards she’d rinse her face and dry it off again, coming back to the living room good as new. It was what she had hoped for but never for a minute what she’d expected.”

Albie’s domestic happiness with his wife and daughter makes Teresa cry with both happiness and surprise. Given Albie’s troubled history of drug and alcohol abuse, arson, and penchant for disappearing without letting his family know where he was, there was little to indicate to Teresa that her youngest would ever be able to find the domestic stability and happiness that eluded Teresa for much of her life.

“‘We were such a fierce little tribe.’”

Holly speaks to Franny when they were adults, reflecting on their time together as a blended family. Though Holly ignores the children’s treatment of Albie, she speaks to how the children quickly bonded during their summers together, especially the girls. They united over their anger toward their parents, whom they blamed for the breakup of their families.

“When Holly remembered her life in California, she remembered seeing everything in terms of who had less than she did and who had more, who was prettier, smarter, who had a better relationship (Everyone, usually), who was getting promoted faster, because as much they had praised her at the bank there seem to be people they preferred. She was constantly trying to figure out how to do it better, how to get it right, and in doing so she had started to grind her teeth at night.”

Holly, who has always worked so hard to please everyone even as a child, is unable to continue under such pressure. Eventually, her need to look outward at others has created a desire to compete. She sees herself in terms of others, which causes her to not only feel stressed at her perceived lack of ability but also causes her to become physically ill. So, she learns how to meditate, which changes everything. Rather than looking outward, she looks inward and is finally able to attain peace.

“Franny couldn’t keep them straight. She knew the Dine boys, that’s what they were called late into their fifties, but their wives, and second wives confused her, their children, in some cases two sets, some grown and married, others still small.”

Not only have the Keating and Cousins families been restructured by divorce, but so have the Dines, whose “boys” (men in their fifties) have also divorced and remarried, resulting in a confusing array of first and second sets of wives and children. Franny, who enjoys listening to the many stories of her own family and step-family, struggles to keep up with the stories of her mother’s step-family, and, despite her efforts at being a good guest and greeting everyone, she eventually slips away from the overwhelming party, with its familiarity and unfamiliarity, for the comfortable familiarity of her step-father’s home.

“‘For the vast majority of the people on the planet,’ Fix had said, ‘the thing that’s going to kill them is already on the inside.’”

While the novel explores the threat of the outsider, as well as how an outsider, such as a step-sibling, can turn into an insider, defusing that threat, while other threats lurk inside one’s own body. There are no doors that can be guarded to protect one from the body’s betrayal. Fix suffers from cancer, Teresa suffers from an abscess, Beverly’s third husband suffers from dementia, Kumar’s first wife suffered from a heart abnormality, Cal suffered from a deadly allergy. While people often focus on external threats, as Fix has all his life, Fix realizes the real threats have always been internal.

“Franny, half asleep on top of the bedspread beside her husband, was unable to map out all the ways the future would unravel without the moorings of the past.”

Franny plays the “what if” game. What if her parents never divorced and their families remained intact? What if Cal had never died? What if she had never gone to law school? That thinking results in other consequences that Franny finds hard to contemplate. She has learned to accept the realignment.

“Beverly looked at her daughter and the look on her face was a pure expression of love. ‘I wanted two girls,’ she said. ‘You and your sister. I wanted exactly what I had. Other people’s children are too hard.’”

The novel rarely shows Beverly’s interior thoughts, except for Chapter 3 when the story focuses on how Beverly is overwhelmed by suddenly having the responsibility of caring for six children over the summer. Chapter 9 focuses on how she is overwhelmed again, this time by the needs of her adult step-children at the Christmas party. Although her actions in the past—such as having an affair with Bert and divorcing her husband Fix—are partly to blame for the consequences of suddenly having so many step-children, the story does not develop her point of view so the reader can understand why she took those actions. However, despite the flat characterization, it is clear how much Beverly does love her two daughters.

“But on this night Franny was grateful he’d held on to it, if only so she could come home.”

In the ever-extended situation of step-siblings and step-parents, home becomes defined in a multitude of ways. Franny leaves the party at her mother’s home to visit her step-father Bert, who lives all alone in a home that she lived in when she was a teenager. Although the house seems too big for Bert now, she is grateful he kept it. He offers her a loving embrace, as he welcomes her home. As the catalyst for change in the Keating/Cousins family lives, Bert is ironically now the most static and stable.

“‘I told you no one would know if you were high.’”

In this flashback to their teenage selves, Franny realizes that the parents are not paying attention to them, but Franny wants Albie to know that she pays attention, and she will be the family he needs. She brings him out of the cold, where he is hiding because he doesn’t want Bert and Beverly to get mad at him for being high, and into the warm house, where the parents are nowhere to be seen.