“Commonwealth” by Ann Patchett

After reading memoir for awhile, I was hungry for a novel, and COMMONWEALTH was on my recommended Kindle list. I bought it on impulse.

It didn’t take long to see I’d spend a lot of time figuring out (or being confused by) who was who. Two families split up, two of the spouses marry each other, and their children interact and go back and forth between them, and the children grow up and marry and have children, and the spouses divorce and remarry, and I spent enough time lost that I surprised myself by continuing.

There is a mystery in COMMONWEALTH, recounting the death of one of the children, and Patchett handles that unfolding of the past very well. She actually seems quite bold to me, to assume the reader can keep up, so I relaxed and let myself read without being clear. Patchett’s characters are believable and compelling enough to keep me reading, but I never got who’s who straight.

The title, “COMMONWEALTH”, refers to a book written by one of the family member’s lovers, and then a movie based on the book, about this complex family. It is a poorly conceived piece of the story and actually gets dropped, which might not be that big a deal except that the book is named for it.

The ending was abrupt and unsatisfying and left me disappointed. This book needed work before publishing it. COMMONWEALTH could have been so much more.