In the windowpane above Ann Patchett’s desk is a small steel and enamel sign that reads: “What good shall I do this day?” This simple dictum is the engine of Patchett’s world, both on the page and off. In the Orange prizewinning “Bel Canto”, comradeship, love and creativity bloom among terrorists and hostages; in 2011’s artful “State of Wonder”, a sensible research scientist faces not just the snakes and other terrors of the Amazonian jungle, but the dragon of her former medical lecturer.
“I have been shown so much kindness in my life, so for me to write books about good, kind people seems completely natural,” Patchett says. “When people say, ‘Oh it’s too nice, it’s naive,’ I just think: who killed your mother?”
It violates a literary taboo to write fiction that suggests people might be fundamentally good. For the 52-year-old Patchett, however, the real taboo was writing about her family. “Commonwealth”, her seventh novel, published recently, spans 50 years and two families, the Cousinses and the Keatings, whose common fate is set in motion at a christening party where Albert Cousins kisses Beverley Keating.
Today, the good that Patchett will do involves picking up a journalist from Nashville’s airport and devoting her whole day to zipping around town in her little silver Prius, showing said journalist her world. Even if she hadn’t published an essay, “The Mercies”, about her schooling with the Sisters of Mercy, you might guess that Patchett had been raised by nuns. She exudes that sleeves-rolled, get-on-with it capability, paired with the clarity and occasional ferocity of true righteousness. To watch her in action is to hear the Mother Abbess from “The Sound of Music” singing, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”. Patchett climbs every mountain, but she will also mutter an occasional, and deliciously un-nun-like, “[expletive]!”
What do you do when the bookstores in your hometown all shut down? If you’re Patchett, you open one yourself. In 2011, she founded Parnassus Books, an idyll in a strip mall, with her business partner, Karen Hayes. She has since become a rallying voice for independent bookstores.
“I feel that writers are treated like orchids: they keep us in the hothouse, they mist us and attend to our every need, but if this system is going to work, if we are going to survive, we need to come out of the hothouse and take responsibility for ourselves and for the health of the industry.”
She takes a firm line. When customers visit the bookstore and tell her Amazon is cheaper: “I’m like, ‘You cannot come in, soak up what we have, talk to the staff, get recommendations, then go home and buy the book on Amazon. If you do, I will hunt you down and smack you around.’ Somehow,” she adds with a grin, “Ann Patchett can say that in a way that your regular bookstore owner can’t.”
She leads the way to the offices at the back, where young women work with dogs at their feet and on their laps. One of the clerks pokes her head around the door and tells Patchett that there’s an Australian fan here who would really like to meet her.
“All right, here we go,” and Patchett heads out to the floor to sign four copies for her fan. Later, she tells me that when people tell her how much they love her books, “I’m smiling, and I’m grateful, but I almost don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s so far away, and what I am thinking at that moment is: I hope I am fixing my face in a way that I look engaged and grateful.”
She and her husband, the surgeon Karl Vandevender, talk about “Ann Patchett” in the third person, as do her friends and colleagues at the bookstore. “They’ll say: ‘Oh, we need Ann Patchett for something’, and I’ll go: ‘I’ll see if I can conjure her up’. ‘Ann Patchett’,” she says definitively, “is the brand. I’ve got to put that away at the end of the day.”
All of her novels, she explains, are the same story: a group of people are thrown together and must forge connections to survive. “I’ve been writing the same book my whole life — that you’re in one family, and all of a sudden, you’re in another family and it’s not your choice and you can’t get out.” Finally, she asked herself: “I wonder if I wrote the story that I’m so carefully not writing, if I might be free of it?”
As soon as she began working on “Commonwealth, “the story of her own parents’ divorce and her subsequent life with step siblings, she announced her intentions to her family. That’s brave, I say.
“Yeah, it is. It was also really smart.” She told them: “‘I don’t want to cut off a part of my life any more. I don’t want to not have access to my own experience because I don’t want to put anybody out. I want to be able to grow. And, I feel, until I get this done, I’m not going to grow.’ And everybody said: ‘You go, girl!’”
Patchett concedes that, until this point, she’d been “very self-congratulatory” over not having written a book about her family, which “seemed like the weak, easy thing to do”. Then she read an essay by Jonathan Franzen in which he insisted that the novelist has to do what scares him the most and, for him, that had been writing about his family. “When I read that, I thought: oh, nothing would scare me more. I would happily ride down the Amazon in a canoe and deal with snakes [as she did to research ‘State of Wonder’] rather than face my family.”
In the title essay of her 2013 non-fiction collection, “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage”, she details the lineage of divorce in her own family, including her own at the age of 25, and her eventual marriage to Vandevender. There is a sense in that essay, which moves in steady, clear-eyed increments, of a writer willing herself into facing and articulating hard truths, of which this is paramount: “Divorce is the history lesson, that thing that must be remembered in order not to be repeated. Divorce is the rock upon which this church is built.”
She recalls sweat pouring down her face as she wrote it, while she experienced the distinct sensation that she was “sitting in the middle of the highway in the dark, with a legal pad, thinking: I’m going to get squashed by a truck”.
She writes candidly, for example, that she, her sister and their stepsiblings “weren’t the products of our parents’ happy marriages: we were the flotsam of their divorces”. In “Commonwealth”, that flotsam is the “fierce little tribe” of the six Cousins and Keating children, each of whom corresponds to her own stepsiblings.
“It’s like chess pieces,” she says, as she explains that each character stood in for a real family member. In this way, “it was very easy for me to keep track of everyone over 50 years. And really, I gave everybody a better life, by a large margin. The people in the book somehow represented my dearest wishes for all the people.”
It’s dedicated to Mike Glasscock, her stepbrother, reimagined here as Albie, the youngest, whom the others find so annoying that they drug him with Benadryl to make him sleep for hours. Years later, as a bike messenger and recovering heroin user, Albie chances upon a novel called “Commonwealth” by a writer called Leo Posen. He realises it is about two families, his own, about “the inestimable burden of their lives: the work, the houses, the friendships, the marriages, the children, as if all the things they’d wanted and worked for had cemented the impossibility of any sort of happiness”. He wonders: “Isn’t that what everyone wants, just for a moment to be unencumbered?”
“It’s certainly my selfish desire,” Patchett laughs. Franny, whom “the nuns had led to believe that God gave preference to people who did things the hard way”, is a cocktail waitress when she first meets the famous novelist Posen. (“Who wants to have a novel about a novelist?” Patchett groans. “But that’s the way it turned out.”) He becomes so drunk that she must help him up to his hotel room, where he has “only enough time left to ask for one more favour, which Franny thought was the deepest difference between women and men”.
Later, that dynamic is amplified in scenes set in the Hamptons, Long Island, where Franny finds herself expected to single-handedly make dinner and drinks for growing hordes of Posen’s guests. They’re some of the funniest of the book.
“You wanna talk about which part of this book is autobiographical?” Patchett says. “That part. How exhausting it is, as a woman, to always be the one who has to make the food and change the beds. No matter how enlightened, how much of a feminist I am, I am still doing all of it. [With] every book I think: well, if this one’s really successful, maybe I won’t have to make dinner any more,” she laughs. “Maybe I’ll finally understand how to not do this any more, because it’s my fault. It’s not only gender, but the 12 years of Catholic school and being trained to be a good servant. I believe in this, I really believe that the greatest thing you can do is to serve.”
“Oh, if I could free myself from the tyranny of good deeds,” she mocklaments. “Oh, there would be no stopping me. I could be Tolstoy without good deeds. I could really be something.”
Over lunch she tells me that she read a Charles Bukowski poem that morning that ends “those who/ succeed/ know/ this secret:/ there isn’t/ one”. It’s stayed with her, perhaps because writing, more than any other art form, is susceptible to “rules”, chief among them being to write every day.
“Don’t you think men are the ones that always say that?” she says. “I’m not sure I’ve heard a woman say you have to write every day. They’re too busy making dinner. I go through long periods of time when I don’t write, and I’m fine. Writing is an amazing place to hide, to go into the rabbit hole and pull the trap door down over your head. I want to have time in my life when I don’t have that cover.”
She also insists that “there are things that are a lot more important than me writing a novel”. For example: “If somebody said, OK, you can either write five more great novels, or you can make sure that the people who work in bookstores have health insurance and have some place to go if they need help because they’re broke. At this point I might really go for the good. Nothing fuels the good of the world like happiness, and the thing that makes me feel really alive is figuring out how I can frighten other people into doing good.”
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
