The story of Commonwealth is simply the tale of two interwoven families; a narrative common to many of us even if every clan is unique. But somehow Ann Patchett manages to spark interest in familial history in a way that your mother and grandmother have always failed to do.

I love inter-generational literature. Int-Lit. I have never heard it described in its own category, but this is what I call it. It refers to a specific brand of often-contemporary writing that moves through eras, introducing a reader to parents of children that will later become central characters. Some of this century’s best fiction has been Int-Lit. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is an example, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake another. Wuthering Heights could be considered the classic model, though it is somewhat muddied by Heathcliff’s insistence on being part of both generations. Patchett cozies up nicely to these genealogical writers and in ways surpasses them. Her attempt at telling the story of the Cousins and Keating families succeeds with grace and power and might be one of her best novels yet. I say this as someone who liked State of Wonder and completely fell for Bel Canto.

The story begins with a magical party reminiscent of the day Jesus fed a crowd from a single loaf of bread and cup of wine. Gin and orange juice seem to flow from invisible taps located in the house of Fix Keating, whose daughter Franny has just turned a year old. Bert Cousins shows up, someone Fix barely knows, and despite Bert’s own growing family back home, he manages to begin falling in love with Fix’s wife, Beverly. In one chapter, Patchett sets up the entire book’s course, and it is a chapter worthy of study in any writing workshop. The tale eventually drifts from Fix, Beverly, Bert, and Theresa, hooking onto their six intermingled children, but like any true familial tale, the parents are never truly absent even when they’re gone.

We follow the kids; Franny and Caroline on the Fix side of things; Jeanette, Calvin, Holly, and Albie on Bert’s side, for the rest of the book. The focus is primarily on Franny, particularly in the book’s one attempt at clever storytelling, but we meet and come to know every one of the kids. Patchett effortlessly jumps around in time to Franny’s late twenties and then into her early fifties, all the while weaving in flashbacks about the kids’ childhoods with the ease of an Olympic swimmer taking a warm-up lap. This is not an easy thing to do for a writer; flashbacks often feel forced or snuck in to the text in unwieldy ways. Patchett is a master, all the while writing in a third-person viewpoint that manages to skip around to multiple characters, sometimes in the same scene, in as deft a way as I have read.

There is something magical about Commonwealth, something honest and raw and authentic that we don’t often get in fiction these days. It never tries to overwhelm any emotion. It doesn’t surprise with cheap parlor tricks, and there are no mysteries to solve. It tells a story that spans the course of fifty years or so with excellent writing and beautiful storytelling. There is one potential “gimmick” that lies with the title itself, but even that is a measure to add depth to an already bottomless well. Patchett is one of our best right now, but if her writing continues to evolve so beautifully, I feel like she could become the best.