We go around thinking that what’s going to get us is waiting on the other side of the door: it’s outside, it’s in the closet, but it isn’t like that. She is capable of such memorable, likely-to-be-quoted-into-eternity lines as the one Fix delivers while battling metastasized cancer: The characters are nothing short of stunning in both their believability (don’t I know Franny and Caroline Keating?) and in the profound (and profoundly-captured) ways in which they feel and love their way through their complicated lives. Like The Dutch House, Commonwealth glides by, quiet and elegant in tenor, as Patchett delicately interrogates the ins and outs of family dynamics in settings so convincingly captured in precise language that I can’t believe I didn’t once spend a night at Leo Posen’s rented house in Amagansett, or prop my feet up against that stone hearth in Bert Cousins’ home in Arlington. In my post on reading slumps and how to get out of them, I wrote: “I need a Dutch House or a Ruth Ware, please and thank you,” and one of you reasonably replied: “I’d turn to Patchett herself to deliver a Dutch House-like read - Commonwealth or State of Wonder!” Thank you, eternally, Joyce, for the nudge.

Commonwealth ann patchett sparknotes