The Dutch House

I received an advance copy of The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett, from HarperCollins, and found that it fits into my pattern of always liking Patchett’s writing while feeling attracted only occasionally to her subject matter (my favorite of her novels continues to be State of Wonder). This novel will be published on September 24.

The subject of The Dutch House is a sibling relationship, as defined by their relationship to a splendid old house they lived in for a few years, early in their lives. Taking the house as a metaphor for the lives of many people Patchett’s age (and mine) on this splendid planet could be interesting, but the story line is very literal.

The story is narrated by the brother, Danny. He explains that “The Dutch House, as it came to be known in Elkins Park and Jenkintown and Glenside and all the way to Philadelphia, referred not to the house’s architecture but to its inhabitants. The Dutch House was the place where those Dutch people with the unpronounceable name lived.” Danny and his sister Maeve lived in the house after their father bought it from the VanHoebeeks, who’d had it built after the first world war.

Raised by his sister, their father and the hired help, Danny is sheltered from the world as a child. He remembers feeling embarrassed when he finds out that the two women who are taking care of him once Maeve has left for college are sisters: “both of them had children, I knew that because Maeve gave them whatever clothes we’d outgrown. I knew because when one of their children was really sick they didn’t come to work. Did I ask them when they came back, who was sick? Is she better now? I did not. I liked them both so much….I felt terrible for failing them.” The sisters are named Sandy and Jocelyn, and there is another servant they call “Fluffy” who was dismissed after she hit 4-year-old Danny in the face with a wooden spoon.

It sounds like an idyllic life: “we never ran out of apples or crackers, there were always stamps in the left-hand drawer of the library desk, clean towels in the bathroom….We would never tell them the laundry needed doing or a floor needed cleaning because everything was done before we’d had the chance to notice.” But everything changed when their father married Andrea, an unpleasant woman with two daughters who
“made weekly menus for Jocelyn to follow and gave her opinion on every course….Why was Jocelyn serving cod when Andrea had specifically told her sole? Could she not have troubled herself to check another market? Did Andrea have to do everything? Every day she worked to find something extra for Sandy to do, dusting the shelves in the pantry or washing the curtain sheers.”

Their father doesn’t appreciate his daughter’s intelligence and generosity. He teaches his son the real estate business, but then dies suddenly and leaves his children with nothing, as the stepmother, Andrea, inherits it all and kicks them out of the house. Their lawyer tells Danny and Maeve that there is one provision he was able to convince their father to make for them, and that’s a trust for Danny’s education. Although Danny becomes a medical doctor, he never practices and gets into real estate as soon as he can manage to do it. He hires the former servant they still call “Fluffy” to take care of his own children.

Maeve and Danny often moon over the past when they’re together, sitting in a car near the Dutch House and watching what goes on there while they talk. Danny marries a woman who doesn’t get along with Maeve and they have three children, one of whom becomes rich enough to buy the Dutch House, after a childhood spent parked in front of it with her aunt: “May insisted that she, too, had lived there when she was very young….she layered Fluffy’s stories about parties and dancing onto her own memories of childhood. Sometimes she said she had lived above the garage with Fluffy and together they drank the flat champagne, and other times she was a distant VanHoebeek relative, asleep in a glorious bedroom with the window seat she’d heard so much about. She swore she remembered.”

When Danny is forty-five years old, he and Maeve meet their mother again, and they come as close as they ever have to fighting, over whether she has any right to be in their lives now after leaving them as children. Danny says to Maeve:
“Okay, if you know so much about her, tell me why she left. And don’t say she didn’t like the wallpaper.”
“She wanted—” Maeve stopped, exhaled, her frozen breath making me think of smoke. “She wanted to help people.”
“People other than her family.”
“She made a mistake. Can’t you understand that? She’s covered up in shame. That’s why she never got in touch with us, you know, when she came back from India. She was afraid we’d treat her pretty much the way you’ve treated her. It’s her belief that your cruelty is what she deserves.”
“I haven’t been cruel, believe me, but it is what she deserves. Making a mistake is not giving the floorboards enough time to settle before you seal them. Abandoning your children to go help the poor of India means you’re a narcissist who wants the adoration of strangers….What kind of person leaves their kids?”
“….Men!” Maeve said, nearly shouting. “Men leave their children all the time and the world celebrates them for it.”

The Dutch House of his childhood gives Danny’s narrative a bit of shape. His story shows the narrow confines of gender roles in the twentieth century and has the feel of a family saga. It doesn’t add up to much, kind of like his sister’s life. We experience a little bit of sound and fury, signifying nothing.