When assistant prosecutor Bert Cousins crashes a christening party at the house of Fix Keating, a cop he barely knows, he improbably winds up kissing the cop’s beautiful young wife, Beverly, sparking an affair that ends two marriages and leads to Bert and Beverly getting remarried to each other. The new family results in a blended menagerie of six kids, who wind up spending summers in Virginia, where Bert and Beverly relocated.
The children struggle to get along with each other when they are forced to be in the same location. They bicker and fight over typical kid stuff, but their parents’ divorces lend an edge to every disagreement. One thing that five of the kids can agree on, however, is that Albie, the youngest child, is supremely annoying.
One summer, tragedy strikes and Cal, the oldest boy, is killed in an accident. The incident splinters the family even further.
And that was pretty much the end of anything interesting happening in this novel. One major problem is how much Patchett jumps around in the timeline. Each chapter takes place at some random point in the narrative, with the reader being thrown into the water and expected to swim. Characters get married, divorced, have children in the spaces between the chapters, and these new people are just there out of the clear blue sky, with no chance for the reader to get to know them.
Patchett does a terrible job developing the characters. Even the children who spend the most time as the center of attention barely have personalities to speak of. Which wouldn’t be as big of a concern if there was anything interesting happening in the plot. All that really happens is that parents get sick, mostly off-screen, so to speak, and Franny begins a relationship with a famous author, who uses her family’s story as the basis for a novel. I got bored just writing that summary.
I have a mixed track record with Ann Patchett, but usually even when I dislike one of her books I can tell what other people see in it. This one has me just mystified.
