Ann Patchet Meet the Author

Ann Patchett is a novelist who spends her stories

They race along with the complexities and their rich

subtleties subsume into a narrative that never seems to flag.

Commonwealth is a story of American life told over nearly five decades

a christening sets in train a series of chance events that

Why do you think it is that so many readers want to come back

It is the one thing that we all have.

We were all a baby, we will all die, we all had parents,

and it is irresistible, it is what we know.

And this begins, as I was saying, at a christening,

It is quite a thing to gate-crash a christening.

And then chance events unfold over quite a long period which determine

the fate really of a couple of families and all sorts of people.

You are fascinated by the business of chance, aren't you?

Of course it is something that I am always going to come back to.

It is hard to write a really compelling novel

when everything is nailed down, when there are no loose bits.

To look at it from the other angle, readers are willing to forgive quite

a lot of chance and coincidence, aren't they, in the interests

I think they are but also it has to be plausible chance

and coincidence or it has to be reckless.

I remember a Paul Auster novel called Moon Palace

years and years ago where everything was crazy

coincidence but it was so crazy and so consistent that the novel

People always talk about Thomas Hardy who was the master

of coincidence and who drove his plot by some of the most

Who else do you read for pleasure among the great novelists?

I was the big Henry James person and somebody who would reread James

over and over again, loved Dickens, loved Austen,

but I own a book shop and I have for going on six years and those

Now I just read not only things that are just out,

the things I read are the things that will be

Henry James, once you get stuck into Henry James he is impossible

No, I will never abandon Henry James.

I will always those go back every few years

It is not that I want to read more James.

I want to just keep rereading the ones that I love.

It is interesting to look at that in respect of your own narrative

because as I said narrative has the feeling of it has a pulse that

You are a great one for concealing the inevitable artifice of writing.

Whereas James was a great one for putting the inevitable

I wasn't influenced by him, I just love him.

I suspect just reading your prose that you're one of these people

once you start a story, although you work at it very hard,

and I have no doubt you are very meticulous, it seems

The reason is that I make it all up in my head for a year or two in

advance and really work out all of the pieces.

In your head rather than on a piece of paper?

Then I sit down and I actually start to write and its miserable and it's

hard but I get it all fixed as I go along, so I write a chapter and then

The book takes place just over 50 years.

A lot of people, there are 11 main characters in this book.

So I had to know what all of the moving parts

When I read a novel or when I write a novel.

It is juggling and if you throw those balls up in the air

When you talk about in the past having read a lot of Dickens,

and of course in those great books of his, that is what it's all about.

This extraordinary balancing of different plotlines,

But all somehow being kept in balance in some almost magical way.

And that's very important because you have to have a balance

and an equality in the tension of the narrative or what happens

is the reader is interested in one plot line more than the other.

So they'll read the part they don't like very quickly so they can get

back to the character they are interested in.

You have to make sure that all of the characters

are in a way equally compelling so that the reader is

You've made an added difficulty for yourself in this book because it

Actually a difficult time in your country.

It was the transition to a new presidency,

you had just had a president assassinated, which most people

It was a very sharp time in American history.

Was it easy to get yourself back to that period?

It was because it is not about that per se.

Certainly these people are living in that time and in 1964 it's

probably the end of this world that you see at the opening of the novel,

the family, strong Catholicism, strong labour relations.

Then one character breaking off and kind of spinning out

In a way it's a sort of harbinger of what's to come

because the process that Americans went through in let's say the 20

years after the opening date of this novel was a tumultuous time in terms

of social change, attitudes, all sorts of things

were unrecognisable from the America of the 50s by the time it was over.

It is interesting to me that you say 20 years.

Because I think of it almost like ten years.

Basically to the end of the Vietnam War.

By the time we had Carter and then Reagan in office

What really fascinates me, we could talk about this all day,

what fascinates me about this is the way that you have found it

possible, and very elegantly, to take us from that period right

forward to a much more contemporary age without it ever intruding.

Characters have different attitudes to the world because they grow

up in different times but the fundamentals

Even as we get tired of them, even as we want them to go away,

our responsibility, or pull backwards, is always

I don't want to ask you an embarrassing question...

Why do you think that so many readers have found you irresistible

What is it do you think about the way that you cast

a story on the potters' wheel that makes it readable?

I had no idea that so many readers did find me irresistible.

The way I look at it is everybody has their own little chip of colour

And their voice and what their interest is personally,

so no matter how much I try to get away from it I'm always going to be

writing books about class, about family, poverty and wealth.

Things that I keep coming back to even if I don't want to.

If readers know it is authentic they will listen to it.

Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth, thank you very much.

It will not surprise you and I say we have had the hottest day of the

year so