Rating: 3/5
Review:
Rather a disappointment
I'm afraid that I agree with several other reviewers: this is a novel by a very fine writer, but it didn't really engage me or add up to all that much in the end.
Commonwealth is story, spread over decades, of two families which splinter and unite in different ways with divorce, marriage, leaving home and so on. It is told in a fractured timescale – which is one of my problems with the book. It's a very common structure nowadays which sometimes works very well, but it's not always appropriate and is sometimes positively confusing and damaging to the narrative. I thought that was the case here. It is a very long time before the real nub of the book is revealed, and the structure just added to the sense - pretty well throughout the book – that this was a lot of excellent prose with some decent characters, but not much else.
I'm afraid I was disappointed in this. We all know that Ann Patchett is a great writer, but I need more than just lovely prose and I'm afraid I got a bit bored by Commonwealth because I wasn't engaged by what was actually going on. After Elizabeth Strout's recent, brilliant Anything Is Possible (not to mention My Name Is Lucy Barton), for example, this was a let-down, I'm afraid. Only a very lukewarm recommendation.
(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)
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