Ann Patchett is a master storyteller and she lives up to this reputation with her latest work - The Dutch House. Her writing is superb and the stories she tells invite you in and before you know it, you’ve developed deep relationships with the characters. This is a story about abandonment, love, family, loyalty, loss, and forgiveness. It is also about growing up and letting go of the past.
There are three main characters - Danny, the narrator and younger brother of Maeve, our second character and the House. The Dutch House was first built by the VanHoebeeks, who decorated it in Dutch style and lived there until they died. In fact, all of their possessions had remained there after they had left this world. Life-sized portraits of Mr. and Mrs. VanHoebeeks adorned the walls of the drawing room and paintings of other relatives hung on walls throughout the house. It was a grand estate with glass in the front that saw all the way through to the flowers in the back. Patchett skillfully gives the House life with vivid imagery and detailed descriptions that you will almost feel like you are there.
The VanHoebeeks weren’t the story, but in a sense the house was the story, and it was their house.
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.
When they were young, Danny and Maeve’s mother abandoned them and Maeve stepped into that role. Danny expressed concern that no one could do the same for Maeve. The two siblings grew incredibly close and stayed that way throughout their lives. Their relationship was very touching and a very appealing aspect of the story.
Several years after their Mother left, their Father married Andrea, who was the epitome of the evil stepmother. Their dislike of her further united them, if that was even possible.
We ate the cookies and dredged up every awful memory of Andrea we had. We traded them between us like baseball cards, exclaiming over every piece of information one of us didn’t already know.
We dug a pit and roasted her.
The Dutch House figures prominently in the story. It drove Maeve’s and Danny’s Mother away — it symbolized to her luxurious excess in a world where others went starving. For their Father, it represented success. The house is what ultimately brought Andrea into their family — she married their Father in order to get it.
For Danny and Maeve, the house was a place to grow up as well as to return. It represented their memories and their pasts. A dominant theme in The Dutch House is the siblings’ inability to let go of the past and their emotional baggage of anger as well as regret. The house physically drew them back time and time again, like a magnet. Whenever Danny returned to town, he and Maeve would end up parked across the street from the Dutch House, watching for any activity or news.
There was no extra time in those days and I didn’t want to spend the little of it I had sitting in front of the goddamn house, but that’s where we wound up...
...like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns.
Looking and watching the house, they would reminisce about the past and wonder if one can ever truly contemplate the past objectively.
But we overlay the present onto the past. 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.
I didn’t even know they were sisters, meaning I was a toad. But that’s me layering the present onto the past.
Ann Patchett weaves together emotional stories, which capture your heart. She is a fabulous writer: here are a few examples of her masterful use of imagery and metaphors/similes.
Whatever romantic notions I might have harbored, whatever excuses or allowances my heart had ever made on her behalf, blew out like a match.
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.
That was it. Fluffy, who had not stopped talking since I walked in the door, shut down like a mechanical horse in need of another nickel.
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