Ann Patchett Is Inside My Head

Ann Patchett had already published her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), before she came to teach Creative Writing at Murray State. I didn’t see a lot of her—I think she was only here for a semester—but we did have dinner at least once and I found her a very poised, pleasant, and smart young woman. That first book was not particularly memorable for me, but it demonstrates that Patchett can create a world that is strange and believable—where the rules are different, though they make their own sense.

            In The Patron Saint of Liars, Martha Rose Sloan Clinton, pregnant with the baby of her husband Thomas, whom she does not love and who does not know about the pregnancy, leaves him in Marina del Rey and drives to St. Elizabeth’s, a home for unwed mothers off the Green River Parkway in Habit, Kentucky, an hour away from Owensboro. She becomes the cook, and when she decides that she must keep her baby instead of giving her up, she marries the handyman, Wilson Abbott, called Son, who has his own sad history and whom she does not love. They raise Cecilia, who eventually learns something of her mother’s history—though not of her own—when Thomas Clinton comes to visit because Rose’s mother has died. He sends a letter telling his intention to come (Rose stopped masking the mailing location of her postcards to her mother), and Rose leaves again. Cecilia realizes it is her destiny to help a girl who has replaced Rose in the kitchen to keep and raise her own child.

A couple of novels intervene before Patchett writes my favorite among her novels, Bel Canto (2001). She loosely bases the book on a hostage situation that took place in Lima some time before. During the course of working on the book, she became completely enamored of grand opera.

            In Bel Canto, Katsumi Hosokawa has reluctantly accepted an invitation to a birthday party for him given by the government of a small South American country in hopes his electronics company will build a plant there. The only reason he has come is the soprano, Roxane Coss, who will sing at the party. He adores opera in general and her singing in particular. Seconds after she finishes her fifth song, the lights go out, and when they come back on, the room is filled with the soldiers—mostly young boys—of the revolutionary group La Familia de Martín Suarez, who have come to kidnap the president. But the president is not there, and the generals in charge of the terrorists are confused; they hesitate. Days pass, and a Swiss Red Cross negotiator persuades them to let the women among the hundred fifty or so hostages go—all of them, that is, except Roxane Coss, whom they heard singing as they prepared to come out of the air conditioning vents that were their access to the house.  After several weeks, she demands to be allowed to sing, finds an accompanist (her own having died of insulin shock shortly after the crisis began) in one of Hosokawa’s executives, and obtains music. The hostages begin to differentiate among the terrorists, learning their names and discovering that two of them are young women. 

            A strange economy develops: although the servants were released with the women, the vice-president, whose house they are all in, takes over the housecleaning, laundry, and other menial tasks, finding that he likes doing them. The priest who demanded to be left behind also works hard, but no one works harder than Gen Watanabe, Hosokawa’s interpreter, who speaks all the European languages and more. The guests—Russian, Swedes, Italians, French, the American soprano, Germans, Japanese—could not communicate with each other or with the terrorists without Gen.

            The hostage crisis drags on for months. Gen falls in love with Carmen, one of the terrorists. Roxane Coss and the gentle Hosokawa also fall in love, and Carmen shows them how to evade the guards and get together each night.  Messner, the Red Cross negotiator, comes to warn the generals (in vain) that soon he will no longer be allowed to come and that the government has no intention of granting any of the increasingly absurd demands the terrorists give him at each visit. But by this time the terrorists play soccer in the yard while the hostages run laps or tend the garden, while Roxane is teaching one of the boys, who has a talent for singing. Everyone, thinks Gen, has been persuaded by music or love or simply habit to give up all thoughts of the outside world and of the future—they all live in a new world and only in the present.

            Patchett manages to turn an inevitable unhappy outcome to the hostage situation into a happy ending, and makes it seem equally inevitable. After this novel she wrote a nonfiction book about her friendship with Lucy Grealy (Truth & Beauty, 2004). I have not read that book or the two novels that followed. The next novel of Patchett’s that I read would perhaps have been a disappointment whichever it had been, after the high point that Bel Canto represents for me. But Commonwealth (2016), if not a great novel, is interesting in many ways, not the least of these being its autobiographical features.

            Commonwealth begins as Francis Xavier Keating (called “Fix” by family and friends) and his wife Beverley throw a christening party for their second child, second girl. To the party comes, uninvited, Bert Cousins, a lawyer in the Los Angeles criminal justice system, where Fix is a detective. Late in the party, Bert carries the baby, the guest of honor, Franny, to her mother, who is checking on the other child in a bedroom. Still holding Franny, Bert kisses Beverley. This kiss sets in motion the complicated events that result not only in the divorce of the Cousinses and the Keatings and the marriage of Bert and Beverley, but more importantly the throwing together of the two Keating girls with the four Cousins children for whole summers in Virginia, where the Cousins have moved. Much of those summers the children are unsupervised and on their own.

            Franny Keating, though admittedly less than a year old, witnesses that first event as she witnesses so many of the book’s happenings and is there as the book ends. She bears witness to the families as their members move and age and die, she has the confidence of the reader—at least this reader—as the one who sees most clearly, and she even makes a public record of some of the events, unwittingly, by telling part of the families’ story to her lover, who is a novelist. The resulting book is close enough to real experience to spur the youngest Cousins boy, Albie, to confront the novelist, who defends himself, predictably, by saying that these people are from his imagination rather than from Virginia or California.

            Along with its concentration on the nuances of the siblings’ attitudes toward each other and their parents, Commonwealth also looks at this question of what happens when real experience becomes transformed into fiction. Patchett has called this book her autobiographical first novel, though it’s actually her seventh: she spent her early years in Los Angeles, the daughter of a cop named Francis, and after her parents divorced was moved to the South and learned to know her stepsiblings.

            Franny insists that she is not a writer, but a reader, yet only a writer would think, as she does at the end of the book when recalling a poignant moment between herself and her youngest stepbrother that she didn’t tell the novelist, that only she knows about that moment, and “she had needed to keep something for herself.”

            Though I have not yet read her account of her friendship in Love & Beauty, I have read some of her nonfiction: her collection of essays This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (2013). Her essays have the same uncanny feature as Bel Canto has for me. In reading them I find her exposition fits my thinking and anticipates it such that if a question occurs to me she answers it in the next line. This sense that she is inside my head is not unpleasant, but rather the opposite.

The book contains twenty-two pieces Patchett wrote for various magazines. Some were early work dating back to college days, but the Byliner and Audible pieces were contracted after the idea for the collection was first thought of, and they, along with the introduction, pull things together into a coherent narrative of life and work.

            In “Nonfiction, an Introduction,” Patchett says that writing nonfiction is much easier for her than writing novels and that she began writing for magazines because it was easier than waitressing or other jobs and left her energy to do her “real” writing—her fiction. Patchett just happened to know editors all over the magazine world, which was obviously helpful.

            She tells us that she dislikes Christmas because of her parents’ divorce (“How to Read a Christmas Story”) and about the Christmas story, read to her by her father over the phone, that made her see that she could be the writer she always wanted to be (“I consider this certainty the greatest gift of my life,” she writes in “The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir about Writing and Life.”) She gives writing advice that she got from Allan Gurganus (“Stack up the pages. Learn to write by writing.”). Grace Paley taught her by example. Russell Banks told her she was shallow. She thinks MFA programs can be useful, in her case for finding “friends and reliable critics among classmates,” but “no one should go into debt to study creative writing.”

            While waitressing, she decided writing a novel was going to be her “getaway car.” With the help of a grant to a writers’ colony, she finished it. About writing she has no superstitions or quirky habits. She is not comfortable writing and not comfortable not writing. But she knows that “time applied equals work completed.”

            “The Sacrament of Divorce” (Vogue 1996) is about her first marriage. “The Paris Match” tells how her second almost ended before it began, in a Paris restaurant, over a word game She lets the reader figure out the solution, though she told the answer to the man who eventually became her husband when he became as enraged as she had become when her first husband played the word game with her.

            Patchett wonders why a woman can’t get a dog without everyone assuming that what she really wants is a baby. She describes how, through research for Bel Canto, her ignorance of grand opera turned into an obsession with it. She weaves an account of her reunion with Karl, her future husband, into an article, probably commissioned by Outside, about renting a Winnebago and driving it through the Badlands and several national parks; “People who don’t like them [Winnebagos] have never been in one.” Her article on Tennessee in State to State: A Panoramic Portrait of America talks about Nashville, the subtropical proliferation of flora in the state, and her visit to the Civil War battlefield of Shiloh. Several pieces here, “On Responsibility” and “Love Sustained,” talk about her care for her aging grandmother and the grandmother’s death.

            A long essay, “The Wall,” describes Patchett’s abandoned plan to write a book about going through the Los Angeles Police Academy. The idea thrills her dad, who retired from 32 years on the LAPD force as a captain. She does pass the entrance tests, written, oral, and physical—including getting over the six foot eponymous wall.

            Two of these pieces are convocation addresses to freshman classes at Miami of Ohio (where they adopted her book Truth & Beauty and the one written by Lucy Grealy, whose friendship with Patchett is the subject of Truth & Beauty) and Clemson, which adopted only Patchett’s book and where there were ugly protests she describes in another piece here, “The Love Between the Two Women Is Not Normal.” She writes about her love-hate relationship with the book tour, about checking into Bel-Air Hotel in Los Angeles to do undisturbed work for a week, and she includes her introduction to The Best American Short Stories of 2006.

            She describes the opening of Parnassus Books in Nashville with her partner Karen Hayes in November 2012. The long title essay talks about her whole marriage history—the disastrous first marriage, from which she was rescued by an alcoholic whom she would have married, had he not fallen in love with someone else just before her divorce was final. “He had done me the two greatest favors that anyone had ever done me in my life: he got me out, and then he let me go.” And she recounts her eleven-year courtship with Karl VanDevender and her decision to marry him when she was convinced he was very ill with a heart problem. She writes about the Nashville flood of 2010, asking “Why do people wait and watch the water rise?” Perhaps, she thinks, because a flood is “at least in the beginning, only rain.” The end of her dog Rose’s life is the subject of “Dog Without End,” and, finally, “The Mercies” describes some of the nuns who taught her in grade school and one in particular with whom she got back in touch years later.

            If you haven’t read Patchett, I would recommend you start with Bel Canto and then read this book of essays.