I am a sucker for an interesting book cover, so it was not really a surprise that the arresting portrait of a dark-haired girl unapologetically staring back at me caught my attention whilst I was browsing books at Barnes and Noble recently. To be honest, I’m not sure I could have just walked away from the book without reading the synopsis at the very least—the painting elicited such a visceral response.
The Dutch House, seemed like an engaging read based on the brief overview the inside flap provided, and although I hadn’t previously read any of Ann Patchett’s other books, I knew her to be a well-renowned author. But, one only has so much expendable income for books, so I considered other titles to buy with my Christmas gift card even though my eyes kept scanning back across the store to the display with The Dutch House.
Eventually, I scooped up the paperback on my way to the register, hoping that the book (stamped as a Pulitzer Prize Finalist) wasn’t going to be a letdown. Excellent cover art can often be deceiving. Fortunately, this one proved to be the perfect exterior to encapsulate an exceptional novel.
The Dutch House is about family—a compelling drama of rags to riches that begs the reader to define what rags and riches really are in the scope of a lifetime. The narrator, Danny Conroy, constantly unravels the threads of his life as he examines the details of a life marked equally by chaos and calm.
The lives of Danny and his older sister, Maeve, seem to revolve completely around the mansion they grew up in, aptly called the Dutch House because of the design influences of its original owners. The house is itself a character in the story without the book ever teetering into fantasy. There was no magic used, yet I found myself often wondering if a long-forgotten curse hung over the imposing glass-walled curiosity of a house.
Just as one could supposedly see right through from the front door to the back garden of the house, the author writes about the characters as though we can see to their inner selves—though I would not describe any of the characters as flat or shallow. This book is a masterpiece of character development through quotidian lives demonstrating the joys and pains we all cause each other to feel. More than just begging the question of what makes a house a home, The Dutch House asks the reader to consider what makes a person part of your family? Even further than that: what amount of hold do we give other people on our capacity to love them and ourselves.
“That night in my sister’s bed I stared at the ceiling and felt the true loss of our father. Not his money or his house, but the man I sat next to in the car…. I had only seen him as my father, and as my father I had judged him. There was nothing to do about that now but add it to the catalog of my mistakes.”
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett (Harper Collins, 2019 | p. 99)
If any of Ann’s other titles are anything like The Dutch House, I will be thrilled. This book was a revelation for me. So full of imperfect love and as beautifully haunting as the portrait on the cover (which by the way, does play a part in the story). The narration of Danny felt so normal I had to keep reminding myself that this book was a novel, not a memoir for how poignantly he retells the good, the bad and the ugly of a life that felt very normal and yet totally extraordinary—which is what I’ve come to understand what life just is.
Family relationships will always be hard to navigate and it is impossible for us to understand those with whom we share our homes and our lives. Parents can’t fully understand the particular lens through which their children view them and the world; children have no way to comprehend the personal histories and present motivations of their parents; spouses will leave essential communications unsaid yet speak incessantly in meaningless critiques; even siblings who are incredibly close will remain an enigma to one another, increasingly so as time passes. Each person is housed in their own body and must reside within their own mind—a wonderful conundrum of the human condition in which we seek to know and be known. In the The Dutch House, Ann Patchett paints this portrait of us all so well.
This book may be for you if you also like: other titles by Ann Patchett; Philadelphia and/or New York City; turn of the century mansions; blended families; rags to riches stories; medical school; oil paintings; grit; personal narrative; real estate; drama; sibling relationships; mother-daughter, father-son, father-daughter, mother-son dynamics; redemption; friends that feel like family.
SDG
L.M.Beatty 
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