Author of eight critically acclaimed novels, the American author Ann Patchett is candid about the writerly obsession her work repeatedly returns to – how will a group of strangers cope when they are thrown together to survive? In Bel Canto, the novel for which Patchett won the Orange Prize, the Pen/Faulkner award and for which she is perhaps best known, it was a hostage situation. In The Dutch House, the circumstances are closer to home in the form of a blended family, a concept Patchett is very familiar with from her own childhood when her mother’s second marriage invited four step-siblings into Patchett’s world.
Since early advance copies of The Dutch House went into circulation an excitable buzz has been building. Cited as the novel Patchett was born to write, her best novel yet, and contender for book of the year, the hype bar has set expectations so high that it creates unreasonable expectations for the reader. And yet, Patchett’s novel rises to the occasion with what appears to be effortless grace.
In essence, the novel is a modern fairytale concerned with the fate of two siblings – Danny and Maeve Conroy – and their wicked stepmother, who exiles them from their childhood home and condemns them to an impoverished life. At the end of the second World War, their father had escaped poverty with an inspired investment that allowed him to acquire a real-estate empire. His purchase of the Dutch House, a lavish 1922 mansion in the Philadelphia suburbs, triggers a series of events from which his family may never recover.
The unshakeable bond between a brother and sister is the backbone of the novel as it charts the course of the sibling’s lives over five decades while they attempt to reconcile their past but continue to fetishise their misfortune. The paradise lost to them becomes an unwavering obsession that they feed with the intense relationship they’ve nurtured; a bond that ultimately must get tested as they inevitably confront those who they feel abandoned them. Throughout the novel is a melancholic thread that heralds a warning of the danger that may derive from too much dwelling on the past.
Familial obsession
Despite the potential for melodrama that the plot offers, this novel is a much more nuanced and bewitching affair than that. The central sibling relationship is a complex and peculiar one that offers a vehicle for Patchett to explore the heavyweight concerns of familial obsession, sacrifice and loyalty. At times the poignancy of her delicate portrayal of the ordinary devastations that befall human beings is incredibly arresting. Perhaps this may be the secret to Patchett’s success; her insightful unpicking of the interpersonal dynamics that drive our relationships and an ability to interrogate the subtext underplaying behaviours. She understands the consequences of forced human interaction and how to test her characters to the point of blistering revelation.
The novel moves on from the well-worn tropes of conflict between stepchildren and a cruel step-parent and instead is invested in scrutinising what it means to be a mother. Could all people in society adopt a motherly role to strangers? How do women navigate the iconography of motherhood and retain their own subjectivity? Patchett has never been afraid to confront these questions in her work and this novel is no different.
The war raged by Patchett in The Dutch House ultimately proves to be less about family politics and betrayal, and more about the battle between memory and the narrative of our childhoods that we convince ourselves of as adults, and truth. As Danny asks his sister, “Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?”
Brimming with intertextualities, Patchett’s prose is confident and meticulous from the opening page; this novel draws you in and holds you safely in its hands until her work is done. The work, like the opulent glass house of its namesake, is clear, solidly structured and purposeful; the style of traditional storytelling that in a less skilled practitioner might appear old-fashioned here becomes transcendent in its simplicity. If a quiet, psychological, family drama could ever be considered a thriller, then this is the book to achieve it. Deserving of the praise it has garnered already, The Dutch House, may prove to be the defining novel of Patchett’s career.
The Dutch House is published by Bloomsbury
