2023/084: The Dutch House — Ann Patchett

There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you’re suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself. [p. 121]

Maeve and Danny's mother left when Maeve was ten and Danny was three: Maeve remembers her, Danny doesn't. After some years their father marries Andrea, who brings with her two daughters (one of whom is given Maeve's lovely room while Maeve's away at college: on returning, Maeve is banished to a garret. Then the father dies, and Andrea swiftly evicts Maeve and Danny from the Dutch House, their childhood home, which becomes a symbol of everything they've lost. Much of the next decade is told as the two sit in Maeve's car, parked across the road from the Dutch House, smoking cigarettes and reminiscing.

I spent much of this novel disliking Danny, who's the first-person narrator. Only after I'd finished reading did I reframe the story. It's not really about Danny at all. It's about Maeve, and what she loses and regains: in some ways it's a fairytale of a wicked stepmother, but it's also about Maeve's relationship with her mother, and her relationship with Danny, and other aspects of her life to which Danny is utterly oblivious. There are a lot of women in The Dutch House: Elna, brought to the Dutch House by Cyril Conroy who doesn't understand it's the epitome of everything she doesn't want; Maeve, who at ten has her portrait is painted when her mother refuses to sit for the artist; Andrea, who's something of a cipher; the housekeepers Sandy and Jocelyn; the dismissed nanny, 'Fluffy'; Danny's wife Celeste. I think it's fair to say that Danny doesn't really understand any of them, and that Maeve is the most important person in his life. It's a story about absent mothers and clinging to the past, about the stories people tell to make sense of their situation.

Patchett's prose is beautiful, and very quotable (I have over a hundred highlights on my Kindle), and even though for much of the novel nothing much happens -- at least from Danny's perspective -- it's never dull. I'm still thinking about The Dutch House, and about my own relationship to my childhood home.

“It’s like you’re Hansel and Gretel. You just keep walking through the dark woods holding hands no matter how old you get. Do you ever get tired of reminiscing?” [p. 237]