The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Sometimes, reading a book that everyone was reading a few years ago can make you feel more behind the times than reading something from a century ago. I knew about The Dutch House (2019) by Ann Patchett, of course, since it won any number of awards and appeared in lots of best-of lists – but I didn’t really know any details, and for some reason it hadn’t appealed. Thank goodness for book group selecting it. Now that I’ve read it, I can certainly see what all the fuss is about.

The first time our father brought Andrea to the Dutch House, Sandy, our housekeeper, came to my sister’s room and told us to come downstairs. “Your father has a friend he wants you to meet,” she said.

“Is it a work friend?” Maeve asked. She was older and so had a more complex understanding of friendship.

Sandy considered the question. “I’d say not. Where’s your brother?”

That’s how The Dutch House opens, and it is our introduction to the family unit living in the house in question. The narrator is Danny, Maeve’s brother, and he is hiding behind the drapes, eavesdropping. The house itself is hard to grasp. I’ve often mentioned that I don’t have a ‘mind’s eye’ for picturing visual descriptions, so I always struggle with that sort of thing, but I struggled here to even have a sense of its size. There are a handful of small bedrooms – but a ballroom on the third floor. It was built for a Dutch family with ornate mouldings and lavish features, but is clearly quite modern and on a street soon crowded with other buildings and a short driveway. I suppose almost all neighbourhoods in America are modern to British eyes.

To go back to that opening, Andrea will eventually be their new stepmother – an unwelcome addition to the household, who seems to make no effort with her boyfriend’s children and see them as an affront on her new position and home. She is young and beautiful, and perhaps that is why Danny and Maeve’s father has chosen to marry her. Danny, the narrator is looking back from several decades in the future, merging his eight-year-old experience with the understanding of a middle-aged man, but in neither iteration is he particularly good at recognising the motivations of others. It often doesn’t seem to cross his mind. Their mother has disappeared – Danny can scarcely remember her – and none of their questions about her whereabouts are satisfactorily answered. They assume she is dead, but if she is alive then her deliberate absence is a kind of death to them.

Much of the first section of the novel is about the unspoken war between Andrea and Danny/Maeve. It is only after two years of Andrea being a regular visitor to the house that they discover she has two daughters of her own, younger than they are.

Nearly two years into her irregular tenure, Andrea walked in the house one Saturday afternoon with two small girls. Say what you will for Andrea, she had a knack for making the impossible seem natural. I wasn’t clear about whether it was only Maeve and I who were meeting her daughters for the first time, or if the existence of Norma and Bright Smith was news to our father as well. No, he must have known. The very fact that he didn’t look at them meant they were already familiar.

This passage is an excellent example of what Patchett is doing so cleverly throughout the novel. As well as some incisive turns of phrase – ‘a knack for making the impossible seem natural’ – it shows how she interweaves Danny’s different perspectives across time. At the forefront is the 10-year-old who thinks his father might not have known about his potential stepdaughters – followed by the older man realising how absurd this remembered confusion is – then followed, again, with a striking memory that supports his more recent understanding of the situation. Patchett is a subtle, sharp writer, and it is extraordinary how she manages to keep the sensibilities of young and old on the page at the same time. All tied together with Danny’s lack of self-awareness. We gradually realise, as the novel continues, how little he truly understands of almost anybody else in his life – regardless of whether he cherishes them or despises them. His flaws are so unspoken that it takes a while – it took me a while, at least – to recognise that is an unreliable narrator. Not because he lies, but because there is so much he doesn’t know, often without realising. (Incidentally, it felt like such a female voice – particularly in the opening chapters, where I had to keep reminding myself that it was a brother, not a sister, narrating. I don’t know why I kept thinking it was a girl speaking, but others at book group agreed.)

I started the novel thinking that it was fine – relatively well-written, ordinary enough. Somewhere along the way I was totally beguiled. Without noticing quite when, I was immersed and filled with admiration. This is the real deal.

Through Danny’s eyes, we see him and his sister grow older. Maeve is away at college – during which, Andrea moves her things into the attic bedroom. Losing her beloved windowseat, and doing so uncomplainingly, is one of the great wounding moments of literature. It reminded me of Jo March’s stories being burned, though Maeve’s response is certainly much more subdued.

Alongside this, Danny is figuring out his future. His father is a property tycoon, buying and selling commercial and residential buildings, and this is the world that Danny longs to join. Maeve clearly has a brilliance with figures, but it is not expected that she shall do significant further education or join the family business. I never worked out the timeline of the novel, but we must be somewhere around the mid-century, or a bit later.

I don’t want to spoil any further events in the novel, but it covers decades of the brother’s and sister’s lives. Tragedy and the selfish behaviour of others shapes the direction of their lives – but their own pettiness and hubris play their parts too. Danny’s marriage and children are a significant part of the latter stages of The Dutch House, but there is one true romance at the heart of the book. ‘Romance’ is probably the wrong word, but I mean it in a sexless way: Maeve is always the focus of Danny’s attention and care. She is the most interesting character in the novel because she is the most interesting character in Danny’s life. He never states it outright, but her wisdom, kindness, and determination are sacred to him.

Which is not to say they never argue. Arguing is their main form of communication. Patchett writes an adult sibling relationship so well in The Dutch House – the sort of relationship that is central to many people’s lives, but seldom addressed in fiction. There is a depth of dependence and trust between them, and a bond that cannot be equalled in any other relationship. It is beautiful, even when it is frustrating and occasionally unhealthy. She captures the sibling dynamic so perfectly in their quippy dialogue, which darts between openness and occasional secrecy. The depth of their care for each other means that some things are kept hidden, for the perceived benefit of the other. And, again, we gradually realise that there is a lot about Maeve that Danny has never truly understood.

I kept thinking that Maeve would be a better title for the novel. She is the narrator’s first and last consideration, even his obsession. She has played sister, father, mother, friend, mentor, and even the cover is a specially commissioned portrait that appears in the novel. But calling it The Dutch House is clever: it keeps the home in our thoughts, even when the narrative moves far from it. It gives the reader an expectancy that the house will return. The legacy of their upbringing is this strange, almost fantastical, home casts a long shadow over their lives. And for reasons they never fully understand, in their 20s and 30s they often return to the house – not to go inside, but to sit in a car outside, smoking and talking.

“This isn’t a stakeout. It’s not like we’re here all the time. We drop by every couple of months for fifteen minutes.”

“It’s more than fifteen minutes,” I said, and it might well have been more than every couple of months.

There is a sharp line later in the book, where Danny realises he is nostalgic not for their childhood, but for the times in the car outside their childhood home. Not for memory, but for memory of memory – filtered through his sister and their conversations.

There is so much in The Dutch House. Whole careers, marriages, twists that wouldn’t be out of place in a murder mystery, but which are played with an almost subdued thoughtfulness. Patchett reminded me of Barbara Kingsolver, or perhaps Carol Shields. Writers who are not reinventing the novel form or taking it into new, shocking directions – but are taking a traditional novel, focusing on characters and their development, and simply doing it with exceptional skill. She elevates the genre. That is Patchett’s real brilliance: to make her creations live so vitally and vividly that it feels important to witness their world.

I hope this doesn’t sound over the top, but few novels convey so successfully how monumental it is simply to live a life.