Commonwealth

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Themes

The Blended American Family

Scenes of family joy and intimacy can be found throughout Commonwealth, such as in Jeanette’s small apartment. It is crowded with the bodies of her husband, son, housekeeper, and later her brother, but it is filled with love. Even Albie creates a similar domestic scene, so loving it makes Teresa weep. Their good fortune with their families is somewhat surprising given that both children were ignored for much of their childhoods. For the most part, the tasks of raising a family are characterized in this novel as a burden from which parents often wish to flee. By the time Bert and Teresa’s fourth child, Albie, is born, the parents are on the verge of divorce, and suddenly the four children become a weight that Teresa must manage on her own.

Because Teresa has to work, she has little time to spend with her children, and so the children must learn to help manage the domestic scene. They are responsible for big burdens, like making sure bills are paid on time so they have electricity and water, and small but nonetheless vital burdens, like making sure there is always freshly squeezed orange juice because it reminds them of how life was when they lived with their father. They eventually travel on their own to Virginia every summer to see their dad. Even when they arrive in Virginia, Beverly is also eager to escape their burdensome company. The children’s ever-increasing needs result in a comical scene in which Beverly flees from her home to her stifling car to escape angry Caroline, crying Franny, needy Holly, rude Cal, Jeanette with her disturbing silence, and especially the youngest, Albie with his non-stop need to speak. Albie is characterized as the greatest burden, both to adults and children alike. The easiest way the step-siblings have figured out how to deal with his demands is to make him sleep. Later they realize that Albie’s only crime was being the youngest at a time when no one wanted to look after him.

As the children grow up and eventually become parents themselves, their parents take great pride in their children, visiting them as they begin to establish their own homes and families. Interestingly, Caroline, Franny, Jeanette, and Albie all have children, but none of the children are characterized as burdensome. However, they also have found loving spouses who share the burden, unlike their parents, who tend to inhabit more stereotypical gender roles for the “baby-boomer era” and all struggled with being single parents at one time.

The burdens of family are complicated by divorce and remarriage, which reshape the family landscape. The familiar burdens of family are transformed into the unfamiliar burdens of the step-family—new schedules, new needs, and new tensions threaten to tear apart the developing bonds. Beverly admits that “other people’s children are too hard,” and she has a hard time adjusting to the fluid nature of her family (312). For the children, especially Franny, the novel’s central character, summer allows them to bond as a “fierce little tribe,” freed from the burdens and stresses of navigating the school year and their day-to-day responsibilities (271). The children relish the days when they are in charge and there is little parental oversight. Beverly and Bert act like children, impulsive and seeming to care only for their needs, which results in the death of one of their children, but brings the other step-children closer together.

Guest-Host Relationships

Guest-host relationships must be navigated not just at parties but any time there is a gathering of people with varying degrees of familiarity with each other. There are three parties in this book, one at the beginning (Franny’s christening party), one in the middle (at Leo and Franny’s summer house), and one at the end (at Beverly’s Christmas party). The guest-host relationships at the first party are characterized by Father Joe as miraculous since all the neighbors come together to share their bounty, their oranges from their trees, and their alcohol from their liquor cabinets so that all would be satiated like the miracle of the loaves and the fish.

However, there is a strain due to the unfamiliar, uninvited guest, and Fix is immediately aware of it. As a police officer, he has a strong desire to protect his family and his home. When Beverly asks him to leave the door open to get more air in the stifling house, Fix refuses, knowing the danger of an open door. He opens the door, letting in each outsider, determining if they are safe enough to be an insider. When he sees Bert Cousins, he is immediately suspicious but he ultimately lets him inside as well. Bert proves to be a curse, at least to Fix Keating, whose wife eventually leaves him to marry Bert. Bert’s trespass is the inciting incident to throw stasis into disequilibrium.

At the second party, the guest-host relations are decidedly more pronounced and strained. Guests keep showing up to the summer house, requiring Franny to prepare meals and serve drinks; she is treated like she is still working as a cocktail waitress at the Palmer House. The scenes keep building with guests unaware of how rude and demanding they are until Albie arrives and brings a sudden halt to Franny’s participation in the farce. In sharp juxtaposition to these rude and demanding guests is the moving flashback to a teenaged Franny welcoming Albie home when he is forced to live with his father as a consequence for arson. While Albie’s father struggles to adjust to his role, Franny has no such hesitation, immediately wrapping her arms around him in a warm embrace and offering him food and drinks to make him comfortable. She turns the outsider into an insider.

The final party shows the fractures running through the Dine family—Beverly’s third nuclear family. While they are all family and thus “familiar” to each other, their abrasive personalities and avarice are reminiscent of the sisters in Shakespeare’s King Lear: “In his retirement Jack Dine’s empire had been divided three ways, giving Matthew the Toyotas, Pete the Subarus, and Rick the Volkswagens. Rick, who was lazy, was also bitter, and often said it wasn’t fair that Matthew got Toyota. No one could compete with Toyota. He particularly envied his brother the Prius” (306).

While Beverly is hosting the party, it’s the Dine “boys” and their families who dominate the party with their needs and comments about their father’s dementia. Beverly tells Franny that the Dines “don’t seem to have any sense of what conversation is appropriate for a Christmas party” (312). While the Dines do not understand appropriate guest-host relationships, Franny understands and fulfills her obligations, making the rounds to greet all of the guests. The role becomes too much for Franny to take, and she escapes to seek out the company of her step-dad, who is alone at his house, only a few miles away. He builds a fire for her and makes her a drink, doing all he can to make her comfortable, welcoming her home. This illustrates that in terms of loving bonds, strength doesn’t lay in numbers.

The book ends with a flashback of when Franny and Albie are teenagers. Albie is worried about getting in trouble because he is high, so he stays outside in a sleeping bag, despite the cold. Franny is the only one who thinks to look for Albie, but when she finds him, he refuses to come inside with her. So instead she tells him, “‘Let me in’ […] And just like that Albie raised up his arm, never taking his eyes off the snow, and she sat down beside him. The sleeping bag was filled with down and when they were wrapped up together it was remarkably warm” (321). Love can transform even the smallest of spaces to create warmth and welcome, whether the spaces are filled with step-siblings, like Franny and Albie, who in some ways are unfamiliar to each other because they have only lived together for a few summers during their childhood.

The power of love to transform the guest-host relationship is also seen between two strangers who meet for the first time as family: the adult Albie and his brother-in-law Fodé. On Albie’s first night staying over in Jeanette and Fodé’s tiny Brooklyn apartment, Fodé squeezes in the bathroom with Albie, saying to Albie, “‘My brother,’ [Fodé] 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’” (169). That is the essence of the true guest-host relationship, opening one’s home to the outsider, no matter how unfamiliar, no matter if they are family, not family, or somewhere in between, in love and trust, knowing that they will look out for each other.

Revisiting and Reconstructing of the Stories of the Past

Patchett invites a comparison between the fictional Commonwealth written by the character Leon Posen and her own novel of the same title. The character of Leon Posen also invites comparison with Patchett herself, raising the question of the line between fiction and fact, imagination and appropriation. This “story within a story” makes the reader aware of the construction of stories, especially the sources of the stories and the function they serve. The book raises the questions of who is telling our story in order to weave us together or tear us apart, and how much of these stories are real or imagined. The book also renegotiates the idea of the author. While Leo Posen emphasizes the singular genius of the author, telling Albie that Commonwealth came directly from his imagination, the constant revisiting and revising of family stories using multiple points of view from both the Keating and Cousins family members creates a type of communal authorship, allowing multiple voices to create meaning from the past.

When Franny meets Leo, she instantly begins imagining how she will narrate the story of how she met him, even as Leo is sitting right in front of her. Although she claims she has no desire to be a writer, she delights in crafting a good story. When Leo writes her story into a book, she delights in it as well—at first. She has a strong desire to understand how the pieces of her life fit together, and as a gifted writer, Leo offers her a way to view her life: “It was the way Leo had listened to her, the way he had asked her so many questions and then told her to tell him everything again. There had been nothing in her life to equal the light of his attention” (208).

In offering her story to be filtered through someone else’s lens, she allows the details of the story to waver from what she’s held as objective truth. In this way, the meanings we make from our familial stories are subjective. Still, the one event of her life she would never wish undone is meeting Leo Posen: “That was the place where Franny’s life began, leaning over to light his cigarette. Somehow, out of all that could have been gained or lost, the thought of having never met Leo was the one thing she couldn’t bear” (311). Leo listens to her, allowing her own life to take center stage; he shows her to understand how the fragments of her life, with its gaps and its mysteries, come together into something “permanent and beautiful” (233). Despite the distortions in both the book and movie versions, Franny would not have wished it any other way. The experience of Leo listening to her stories and understanding them have helped her to understand her own life in transformative ways.

She has also learned how to listen to others carefully, encouraging them to continue with their stories, showing she values their stories just as Leo did. When her father receives chemo, she wants to hear all of his stories before it is too late: “This was the deal of taking her father to chemo when none of the doctors spoke in terms of a cure: this was the time she had, these were all the stories she was going to get” (56). Fix narrates Chapter 1 to Franny because Chapter 1 ends with the birth and naming of Albie and Chapter 2 immediately opens with Franny asking, “So you’re telling me that you named Albie?” (35). Franny continues to ask about the events of Chapter 1: “Franny had heard the story about the fire and the phone call that came after it a hundred times but somehow the one about Albie’s name had never come up before” (37) Even the nurse asks questions, causing Fix to say, “We should be telling better stories” (36).

Clearly, Franny and Fix talk often about the stories of the past, and when Franny discovers a “hole” in the story, she is eager to learn the details to have a fuller understanding and so she can later share those details with her sister Caroline. This questioning of the past occurs throughout the books. Chapter 6, focused on the invited and uninvited guests who arrive at Franny and Leo’s summer house, seems to be a story that Franny is narrating to Fix and Caroline since Chapter 7 opens with Caroline and Fix asking Franny questions about those events: “‘How have I never heard that part of the story?’ Caroline asked” (223). The multiple authors and the recycling of stories allows Franny (and others) to interrogate and understand the past, and there is an urgency now that they have no time to waste.