Review of THE DUTCH HOUSE by Ann Patchett

4 Stars

This family saga focuses on Danny Conroy and his sister Maeve.  As children, the two live in the grandiose mansion his father Cyril bought fully furnished as a gift for his wife Elna.  When Danny is 3 and Maeve is 10, Elna disappears.  Cyril then marries Andrea, a young widow with 2 daughters.  She proves to be the wicked stepmother of the tale, especially when Cyril dies and she banishes her stepchildren from the house.  Once evicted, Maeve and Danny often park on the street with a view of their former home and discuss their past in the house.

Danny is the first person narrator; as a middle-aged adult, he looks back at his childhood and early adulthood.  His narrative jumps around in time.  As he describes events, he also reflects on those events so childhood memories are subjected to mature analysis. 

For the longest time, the two siblings resist letting go of their painful memories of events in the house:  “like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captive of our migratory patterns” and “made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it.”  For years and years, “the house was the hero of every story, our lost and beloved country.”  Celeste, Danny’s wife, has little patience with their obsessive nostalgia; she tells Danny, “’It’s like you’re Hansel and Gretel.  You just keep walking through the dark woods holding hands no matter how old you get.  Do you ever get tired of reminiscing?’”  Only later do they realize that keeping the house as a shrine of their resentment means they are not moving on with their lives:  “we shouldn’t still be driving to the Dutch House, and the more we kept up with our hate, the more we were forever doomed to live out our lives in a parked car on VanHoebeek Street.” 

The novel questions whether the past can ever be accurately remembered.  At one point, Danny asks Maeve, “’Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?’”  Maeve claims to see the past clearly but Danny argues, “’we overlay the present onto the past.  We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.’”  When it comes to Andrea, Danny wonders, “’why do I scrub out every memory of kindness, or even civility, in favor of the memories of someone being awful?’”  Their memories are selective and tinged by a lack of understanding; only later in their lives do they come to understand the behaviour of their parents and come to terms with the neglect and abandonment they experienced.  As an adult, Danny can think about his taciturn father and admit, “I had never thought about him as a child.  I had never asked him about the war.  I had only seen him as my father, and as my father I had judged him.”  He wishes he had “thought less about his unwillingness to disclose and more about how stupid I’d been not to try harder.” 

The sibling bond is another theme in the book.  After Elna leaves and after Cyril dies, Maeve looks after her brother.  She becomes his surrogate parent, and he seldom questions her decisions about his life.  For instance, he wants to be a real estate developer like his father, but Maeve tells him he must go to medical school to liquidate the educational trust set aside for him and his two stepsisters so there will be nothing left for the girls. 

Danny loves his sister, more even than he loves his wife.  Maeve is his closest friend and confidant, so it is understandable that Maeve and Celeste do not like each other.  Danny comments, “I had picked the woman who had committed herself to smoothing my path and supporting my life.  The problem was that Maeve thought she was taking care of that herself.” 

I found this book to be totally absorbing.  There is a line in it I will long remember.  Cyril gives his wife a mansion as a gift, not realizing that it represents all that she does not want, so he is described as “a man who had never met his own wife.”