![]() ![]() The Dutch House belongs to a tradition in both fairy tales and American fiction of motherless children (sometimes raised by their father, often with the aid of an aunt or trusty hired help) - books that include Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Patchett's previous novel, Commonwealth (2016), was her most autobiographical, and it also involved blended families and children left too much to their own devices. "We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we're not seeing it as the people we were, we're seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered." "But we overlay the present onto the past," Danny objects, a statement that highlights the trickiness of retrospective personal histories, including the one we're reading. On one of these visits Danny asks, "Do you think it's possible to ever see the past as it actually was?" Maeve insists she does just that. We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father." Danny adds later, "We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it." Whenever Danny returns to Pennsylvania to visit Maeve, the two park across the street from their former home to mull over what happened to them: "like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. The Dutch House is also about obsessive nostalgia. Even in my own house I had no idea what was going on," he comments.Īuthor Interviews Patchett: In Bad Relationships, 'There Comes A Day When You Gotta Go' "The problem, I wanted to say, was that I was asleep to the world. ![]() But eventually Danny comes to realize how much he's missed along the way, including the fact that the Conroys' two loyal housekeepers are sisters. Many of the details about his eccentric upbringing come courtesy of his older sister, a much more interesting character. Because Danny is by design a clueless, tight-lipped character, it isn't clear that this was the right choice an omniscient third person narration might have been a better way to get deeper inside him. Rare among Patchett's fiction, The Dutch House is written in the first person, from Danny's adult point of view. Their expulsion from paradise becomes quite literal a few years later in classic fairy tale fashion, Cyril is putty in his second wife's hands. ![]() The wicked stepmother's arrival, even more than their mother's ghosting, marks the end of Danny and Maeve's childhood. She certainly doesn't fall in love with Cyril's two children. ![]() Patchett's eighth novel is a paradise lost tale dusted with a sprinkling of 'Cinderella,' 'The Little Princess' and 'Hansel and Gretel.'Īndrea, a pretty young widow 18 years Cyril's junior, falls in love with his house and then finagles her way into it with her two small daughters. After she flees, ostensibly to India to devote herself to the poor, her family suffers, as if "they had all become characters in the worst part of a fairy tale," Patchett writes. His wife, Elna, hates it, aesthetically and ethically. The house, built by a Dutch couple who made their fortune in cigarettes, is grand, with an ornate dining room ceiling, six bedrooms on the second floor, and a ballroom on the third floor. Home is the eponymous Dutch House, a 1922 mansion outside Philadelphia that their father, Cyril, a real estate mogul, bought fully furnished in an estate sale as a surprise for his wife in 1946, when Maeve was 5. Two siblings, Maeve and Danny Conroy, bond tightly after their mother leaves home when they're 10 and 3. Patchett's eighth novel is a paradise lost tale dusted with a sprinkling of Cinderella, The Little Princess and Hansel and Gretel. And despite a few small reservations, this is the story of a happy book critic: The Dutch House is another wonderful read by an author who embodies compassion. How?Īnn Patchett may well be the most beloved book person in America - not just for her irresistibly absorbing novels and memoirs (including The Patron Saint of Liars, Bel Canto and This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage) but for becoming a patron saint of readers and publishers when she opened Parnassus Books in her hometown of Nashville, Tenn. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Dutch House Author Ann Patchett ![]()
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