Review: 'The Dutch House' by Ann Patchett

I won't lie, my first impulse to read The Dutch House came from it's name. I'm half-Dutch and lived in the Netherlands for most of my childhood. I have very fond memories of the architecture and the people, which means I hoped for some kind of nostalgia from The Dutch House. Ann Patchett gave me much more than that. Thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.


Pub. Date: 9/25/2019
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. We pretended that what we had lost had been taken from us by the person who still lived inside.*****A masterpiece from the Orange Prize-winning, New York Times number one bestselling author of Commonwealth and Bel Canto: a story of love, family, sacrifice, and the power of place.***** 

Danny Conroy grows up in the Dutch House, a lavish folly in small-town Pennsylvania taken on by his property developer father. Though his father is distant and his mother is absent, Danny has his beloved sister Maeve: Maeve, with her wall of black hair, her delicacy, her brilliance. Life is comfortable and coherent, played out under the watchful eyes of the house’s former owners in the frames of their oil paintings, or under the cover of the draperies around the window seat in Maeve’s room. 

Then one day their father brings Andrea home: Andrea, small and neat, a dark hat no bigger than a saucer pinned over a twist of her fair hair. Though they cannot know it, Andrea’s advent to the Dutch House sows the seed of the defining loss of Danny and Maeve’s lives. Her arrival will exact a banishment: a banishment whose reverberations will echo for the rest of their lives. 

For all that the world is open to him, for all that he can accumulate, for all that life is full, Danny and his sister are drawn back time and again to the place they can never enter, knocking in vain on the locked door of the past. For behind the mystery of their own enforced exile is that of their mother’s self-imposed one: an absence more powerful than any presence they have known. 

Told with Ann Patchett’s inimitable blend of wit and heartbreak, The Dutch House is a story of family, betrayal, love, responsibility and sacrifice; of the powerful bonds of place and time that magnetize and repel us for our whole lives, and the lives of those who survive us.

As The Guardian notes in its review, the 'immense “folly” at the heart of this novel' is the Dutch House itself. The concept of the 'folly' comes from medieval morality plays and is usually shown as a character leading the protagonist astray, or at least attempting to. In The Dutch House, the house itself is what influences all the characters. Beautiful inside and out, it is the locus for many of the novel's most dramatic scenes. It's where families are created and broken, where good fortune meets bad fate. It is full of the belongings of its previous, Dutch inhabitants who either died tragically in the war or of illness. It is also full of childhood memories for our narrator Danny Conroy, who never knew another home. The house is a place of love, memory, grief and mistakes, and these themes continue to play throughout the novel.

Aspects of different fairy tales echo strongly through The Dutch House, especially Cinderella. With their mother tragically disappeared, Danny and Maeve are exposed to a new step-mother, Andrea, with two young daughters who exacts their banishment. The two siblings now set out not unlike Hansel and Gretel, except that the new reality they find themselves in is the true witch's house. Devoid of inheritance, Maeve makes Danny bilk an education trust set aside for them and Andrea's children, laboring for a profession he has no intention of taking on. There are surprise reveals, fairy godmothers of a sort, amoral saints and a deep sense of tragic fate. As Patchett writes: “They had all become characters in the worst part of a fairytale.” There is no escaping where their path is leading, and yet both Maeve and Danny take one step at a time, overcoming and reliving. There is no magical solution and a lot of life will feel wry and cruel, yet Patchett never forgets the magic of the small moments.

Told non-chronologically, Patchett relays the entire life of Danny and Maeve's consistent presence in it. The narrative loops back and forth through time, revealing much before it has happened and yet never losing its tension. Patchett's novel asks its reader how we cope with grief and with the past. Can we reconcile ourselves with it? Is revisiting the place of loss beneficial or not? Should those who transgress against us be punished, and if yes, how? And is history bound to repeat itself? For all these big questions, Patchett has written a beautiful novel, full of heart-warming and heart-breaking moments that show us the true impact of family. I adored Maeve, she is one of my favourite characters I've read in a while. She is full of heart, stubborn, proud and deeply wounded. Through her major 'folly', but also through her straightforward yet magical writing, Patchett crafts a story that is both benediction and conviction for its characters. At the end, I walked away feeling that I had read something true.

I give this novel...

5 Universes.

The Dutch House is a beautiful novel, one that kept me constantly, deeply engaged with its characters. This was my first experience reading Patchett but I have developed a deep affection for her writing and can't wait to dig into her other novels. But The Dutch House will stay on my mind for a long time.