The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner on October 13, 2019

https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/dutch-house-a-powerful-drama-about-family-and-memory/

Ann Patchett’s remarkable new novel ‘The Dutch House’ dives deep into family dynamics, the amorphous nature of memory and the power of the past to shape the present. Patchett continues the theme of her superb book, ‘Commonwealth’: adult children sorting through the detritus of parents’ troubled lives. Patchett’s graceful prose is rich with references to fairy tales and parables. The result is a novel dense with human drama and layers of meaning.

After WWII, Cyril Conroy is a poor man. Due to one successful investment, he becomes wealthy and purchases an iconic house in a suburb of Philadelphia. “Be careful what you wish for” could be the novel’s subtitle; this acquisition is the beginning of the end of Cyril’s happy family and sizable fortune. The mansion, once owned by a Dutch family, is ornate, opulent and architecturally significant. Cyril is confident his new bride, Elna, will fall in love with its lavish beauty. He couldn’t have been more mistaken. Elna, who had considered becoming a nun, hates the ostentatious house. One day, she permanently leaves the Dutch House and her family, choosing instead to help the poor.

This abandonment creates trauma for her three-year-old son, Danny and most especially for her ten-year-old daughter, Maeve. Eventually, their father remarries. His new wife, Andrea, and her two daughters move into the Dutch house, dislodging Danny from his childhood and displacing Maeve from her bedroom. When Cyril Conroy dies unexpectedly four years later, the stepmother, Andrea, cruelly throws Maeve and Danny out of the Dutch house that she now owns. Maeve becomes Danny’s guardian and protector.

Narrated from Danny’s point of view, the novel follows Maeve and Danny as they attempt to make sense of the events that led to their eviction. Though they obtain college degrees, secure jobs, and in Danny’s case, marry and have kids, Maeve and Danny are bonded to one another and trapped in the past. For decades they keep returning to the Dutch House as if a magnetic force is pulling them toward it. While parked across the street, they sit in Maeve’s car and gaze at their old home. With anger, sadness and humor, they examine their past. Maeve shares memories of their mother with Danny. Together, they analyze their enigmatic father and resent their mean stepmother. Danny’s wife says, “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?”

Their mother’s painful abandonment, their father’s careless choices and their stepmother’s petty vindictiveness alter the trajectories of their lives. As the single remnant of their childhoods, the Dutch House becomes a kind of museum of their memories. Then one morning, when Maeve is forty-nine and Danny forty-two, an unexpected event occurs and they decide to stop parking across the street. Twenty-seven years have passed since their expulsion. They realize, “We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it.”

Yet the story is far from over. The Dutch House’s grip on their lives lessens but does not vanish. They must once again broaden their perspective of their past and open themselves to an unforeseen present.

Ann Patchett is like an archeologist excavating an emotional ruin. Her two main characters ask questions, analyze facts and arrive at hypotheses that morph with time and greater understanding. Danny and Maeve acknowledge that their memories might be unreliable and shaped to align with the narrative they created. But isn’t that the nature of recollection?

The surprise ending is moving without being maudlin. Acceptance, forgiveness and healing occur in unexpected ways. Ann Patchett’s talents as a writer are evident on every page. As one character says, “Sometimes you’ve got to put the past in the past.” With empathy, Ann Patchett shows us why that is easier said than done.