Like “Bel Canto,” the best-known of Patchett’s six earlier novels, “Commonwealth” starts with an unexpected kiss at a party - in this case a kiss at the christening party for the infant Franny. I viewed it as an implicit rebuttal to today’s helicopter parents, an argument for letting kids enjoy their unsupervised exhilaration: “They had done everything they had ever wanted to do, they had had the most wonderful day, and no one even knew they were gone.” But as “Commonwealth” progresses, something alarming enough occurs that the case is made for being helicopter-ish after all. “The candy bars were starting to melt and the gun was hot from being out in the sun and they put them all together back in the bag.”Īs a reader, I fell fully under the spell of this chapter, and I’m also pretty sure I misinterpreted it. Patchett wisely underplays the drama - the chapter is a masterly example of showing rather than telling - and the increasingly shocking details speak for themselves. Thus the children eat breakfast at a diner, then gather supplies, including soda, candy bars, a gun and a fifth of gin, and hike to the lake, where they spend several hours swimming and leaping from a high rock.
Their blended family is on a car trip, staying in a motel near a lake, and the parents - the beautiful, overwhelmed mother of two of the girls and the affably selfish father of two more girls and two boys - have left a note that reads We’re sleeping late.
In the most vivid chapter of Ann Patchett’s rich and engrossing new novel, “Commonwealth,” it is 1971 and six stepsiblings ranging in age from 6 to 12 years old have been left to their own devices.
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