The Dutch House

Dan Conroy relates the three-generation saga of his family starting with the day his father, real estate developer and landlord Cyril brings his new girlfriend Andrea home to meet Dan and his older sister Maeve. Their meeting is stiff and formal. Dan wonders if his father had forgotten to mention to Andrea that he had children. But whatever her feelings about them might have been, clearly, she loved the house, a three-storey Dutch Colonial Revival mansion in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, home to Philadelphia’s wealthiest merchants. Large portraits of the VanHoebeeks, the original owners hang in the drawing room, with eyes, Dan remembers, “that would follow a boy with disapproval no matter which of the sofas he chose to sit on.”

Dan show more and Maeve’s mother left them and went to India when Dan was so young that he has no memory of her. He’s content living in the big house with his sister, his father, and their servants Sandy and Jocelyn. He wonders how Andrea might fit into their domestic situation. He reflects:

“After her first appearance at the Dutch House, Andrea lingered like a virus. As soon as we were sure we’d seen the last of her and months would go by without a mention of her name, there she’d be at the dining-room table again, chastened by her absence at first and then slowly warming over time. Andrea, fully warmed, talked about nothing but the house. She was forever going on about some detail of the crown molding or speculating about the exact height of the ceiling, as if the ceiling were entirely new to us.”

Life does not proceed smoothly after Andrea becomes the second Mrs. Conroy in the tale of inheritance and succession, maternal deprivation, real estate development, resentment, revenge, and reconciliation. Family traits and roles are passed down from parent to child and aunt to niece. The strong bond and mutual support between brother and sister, their former servants, and other family members keep them afloat as the tide of their fortunes ebb and flow. This is a cyclical tale of riches to rags to riches, complete with an evil stepmother, told with realistic veracity by a master of the art. show less

Here's another engrossing read from Ann Patchett about the lifelong relationship between two siblings and the house they grow up in.

The Dutch House is an oversize, hand-crafted mansion built by a wealthy Dutch couple outside Philadelphia. After their deaths the house, with all its contents, wind up in the hands of an ambitious real estate entrepreneur, his wife, and two children. It's the relationship between these two children (Danny and Maeve) that is central in the book. Danny is the book's narrator and his sister, six years older, becomes the central figure in his life.

While I won't relay more details for fear of spoiling your own discovery of this wonderful story, the novel turns out to be full of rich, complex and deeply real show more relationships. It explores the ways well-meaning partners unintentionally overlook and hurt their mates. The profound, lifelong bond between parent and child. The ways blended families do and do not work out. And how unresolved childhood issues can haunt adult lives. They are stories about commitment and love, anger and revenge, deep loyalty, and the reliable nature of memory.

The characters are richly drawn and multi-layered and it's a pleasure to accompany them on their individual voyages of self-discovery. show less

“But nothing ever happens”
- “Lemon Tree” (Fool’s Garden)

I’m going to spoil this rather thoroughly, so proceed with mild caution.

Maeve and Danny are the children of Cyril and Elna Conroy. Cyril built a property empire from scratch, taking Danny along to collect rent in cash. Maeve, Danny’s older sister, is mostly sidelined and left in the care of “Fluffy”, the nanny, and the household staff, Sandy and Jocelyn.

»“Money,” our father said, nodding. It wasn’t a complicated idea.«

Elna is largely out of the picture after leaving, first periodically, soon permanently. While Danny is mostly unaffected due to not even remembering his mother, Maeve is desperate to see her again.

A few years after Elna leaves, Cyril marries show more his second wife, Andrea, who becomes Maeve’s and Danny’s evil stepmother. When Cyril unexpectedly dies, Andrea basically evicts everyone but her own two children, Norma and Bright, from the eponymous “Dutch House” and they build (mostly) independent lives. Good for them.

Unfortunately, that’s all that ever happens in this novel. Yes, the writing is fine and the narrative style is engaging and very sensitive at times…

»“There you are,” she said, and smiled at me. “How are you feeling?”
It would be years before I understood the very real danger of what had happened to me. At the time I saw the surgery as something between a nuisance and an embarrassment. I started to make a joke but she was looking at me with such tenderness I stopped myself. “I’m okay,” I said. My mouth was sticky and dry.
“Listen,” she said, her voice quiet. “It’s me first, then you. Do you understand?”
I gave her a loopy smile but she shook her head.
“Me first.”«

… but I’m sorry, that’s just not good enough. The blurb promises this:

»The Dutch House is the story of a paradise lost, a tour de force that digs deeply into questions of inheritance, love and forgiveness, of how we want to see ourselves and of who we really are.«

This is simply not true. The “Dutch House” never was a paradise for any person in this novel. The house is “paradise” only as a symbol (wealth, safety, belonging), but emotionally it’s contested and poisoned.

»The house is a piece of art.«

The simple fact that the novel tries to cover about 50 years in standard novel length (about 300 pages) does not make it “a tour de force” but only succeeds to ensure that the story about Maeve, as the narrator Danny puts it, leaves her as a thin, unexplored, shallow character. Even if we follow the blurb and take the other characters into this, it still keeps scratching the surface of family dynamics and character exploration.

There simply are no “deep digs” into anything just because the story doesn’t even have enough room to develop fully. Love, death, forgiveness (and too many other aspects); yes, they’re all there but just as part of life, not as something that deserves room to be shown, observed, and evaluated.

In its current form, “The Dutch House” simply depicts primarily two lives unfolding. That’s fine, but it’s far from enough.

Two stars out of five.

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Ceterum censeo Putin esse delendam show less

The Dutch House was my first Ann Patchett novel so I had no idea what to expect and was pleasantly surprised.
As the title suggests, this is essentially a story about a house, dating back to the original Dutch owners in the 1940s, and the effect it has on all who live in it - Cyril and Elna Conroy, their children Maeve and Danny, stepmother Andrea and her two daughters as well as the ‘staff’, Fluffy, Sandy and Jocelyn.
Narrated by Danny, The Dutch House is a slow-paced, character-driven story spanning 50 years. Although Maeve was the stand-out character for me - intriguing, vengeful and controlling, feisty, determined and self-sacrificing – the flaws and failings, hopes and desires of everybody else drew me.
Moving and nuanced, sad show more and uplifting, The Dutch House is as much about the purpose and power of property as it is about the people who inhabit it. show less

I discovered Ann Patchett and Anne Tyler at about the same time, as a result of which I've since had an unreasonable tendency to mix them up with each other, even though they are quite different kinds of writer and a generation apart in age. I finally got it straight in my mind which is which, and then Patchett went and wrote an Anne Tyler novel, and I'm back to square one...

... Well, not quite an Anne Tyler novel. There is a big house; we are on the fringes of an East Coast city; there is an Irish-American extended family; they are in the building trade; we have a multi-generation timeline from the 1940s to the present day, and so on. But, for one thing, it's Philadelphia not Baltimore, which probably makes a big difference if you show more happen to know either of them, and for another, where Tyler's stories are usually focussed on the matriarch, this is a story that centres on the absence of the mother.

The central question the book poses — why we find it so much harder to forgive a mother who leaves her children than we do a father — is perhaps a 21st century one, but everything else in this novel is comfortingly, even cloyingly, old-fashioned. The house is only an overgrown suburban villa really, but Patchett turns it into Manderley; people sit in cars and smoke cigarettes; boy meets girl in a train; there are delightful feudal relationships with servants; there's a good selection of funerals, weddings and family celebrations; there's even a portrait that spookily doesn't get any older. It's pleasant reading, very professionally done, a book you wouldn't hesitate to give your grandmother for Christmas, but it's not very likely to be a book you will remember long after you have read it.

I was amused by Tom Hanks's narration of the audiobook: they obviously forgot to get him to record the chapter-numbers and had to patch them in later, and there's a wonderful mix of resignation and exasperation in the way he says "Chapter Seventeen" and so on. show less

I am not entirely sure why I loved this book so much. Two children left with their father in a veritable museum of a house meet with all sorts of tragedies and roadblocks, and yet manage to find solace in one another while remaining forever haunted by the loss of the house. The writing is sublime. We see everything through the eyes of Danny, starting at a very young age until he's in his 50s. The narrative does hop about in time a bit, but it didn't get confusing, thankfully.

The unchanging house is an entity unto itself. It's the people living in it and those who are drawn to it who seem to fall apart.

"I’d never been in the position of getting my head around what I’d been given. I only understood what I’d lost."

I do love this show more author's work. show less

This is a quiet, moving, utterly absorbing story of a brother and a sister. When they were young, they lived in a ridiculous house, a beautiful house, a fairy tale house--the Dutch House. And their mother abandoned them. There is an evil stepmother, as well, and when Danny is older, he and his sister are exiled from the Dutch House. Danny, the brother, narrates the story and was too young to really remember his mother. He never really understands why she left, but he has his older sister instead. It is still that most unforgivable crime for women to commit: abandoning their children. Never mind that men do it all the time, as Danny and Maeve's father did, in a sense--yet Danny grows up angry at his mother and wanting to be his father. show more It takes him a whole lifetime to figure this stuff out--and I'm not sure he ever really does, completely--but in the meantime, he tells the story of his sister, and ultimately of his mother and his daughter and the other women who noiselessly and without fanfare, almost without him noticing, shaped his life. The end, for me, was perfect and moving. Life is a wheel. show less