Virtuoso Storytelling

~ The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett ~

This is a classically excellent family saga. I always look immensely forward to any new Patchett novel, and this was no disappointment. The Dutch House of the title is a lavish and almost over the top mansion in Pennsylvania, which property dealer Cyril Conroy buys  in the 1940s from the impoverished Van Hoebeek family for his first wife, Elna, and their children, Maeve and Danny. The Dutch House is so unreasonably sumptuous and seemingly out of place in its opulence, that it affects all its inhabitants to no small extent, shaping their lives, and colouring their relationships with each other.

When the novel commences, 10 year old Danny is our protagonist. It is not Danny’s mother, Elna however, whom we meet straightaway, it is Andrea, who has come to be introduced to Danny and Maeve, as she is soon to be their new step mother. Elna remains a mystery for most of the novel, having walked out of her family when the children were very young. Maeve steps into her mother’s place to look after her little brother 7 years her junior, and the two retain a very strong and immensely close relationship throughout their lives.

This relationship gives them strength, but also disrupts Danny’s relationship with Celeste, later to be his wife. The novel beautifully weaves in all the family secrets, the many related characters, the servants and nanny in The Dutch House who play such key roles in the Conroy family’s lives. Cyril Conroy dies unexpectedly of a heart attack when Danny is just 15, resulting in Andrea asking Danny (and the servants) to leave the house almost at once as the Dutch House now is Andrea’s. Danny’s life nevertheless continues to be dominated by decisions Andrea has made because of the Educational Trust Fund she had set up for him and her daughters. Maeve is determined Danny will milk the fund as much as possible to leave as little as possible for Norma and Bright, so she chooses for him the most expensive and longest courses she can find in the field of medicine – although Danny does not want and has never wanted to be a doctor.

A bald stating of the plotline does this novel no justice at all. Although it is all about the plot, the beauty of the novel lies in how it is unfolded, what facts are given to the reader, when, and how, and in the interaction of the beautifully conceived characters. The characters all grow, all go on their own Bildungsroman, their lives continue to interweave with each other’s, many of them cannot let go of the Dutch House or the time they lived in it, even when they no longer live in it, even when it has been decades since they have lived in it. Its grip on their imagination is as powerful as Patchett’s grip on her readers.

It is too simplistic to say this novel is about a dysfunctional family who lived in a house which overwhelmed them. It is that, but it is so much more too. It is about loves and loyalties that interpellate throughout the course of decades of lives, it is about inheritances, from familial to financial, it is about the disproportionate pull of a singular property/structure on obsessions and emotional territories and the geographies of the imagination. It is a masterfully written novel, the creation of a craftsman and virtuoso storyteller, the kind of read which absorbs satisfyingly from cover to cover.

Now it is a matter of trying to be patient and waiting for the next Patchett novel!