The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett

Just listened to this from Audible.com, and Tom Hanks is a delightful reader. He has certain cadences that feel very true to him, idiosyncratic even. Not that I can recall any at the moment, of course. But even when I can predict how the sentence he is reading will end, I was frequently surprised by how he said it.

Of course, I don’t just listen to any book from Audible—I listen to the 5 minute sample, which is plenty long enough to decide if the voice is going to be irritating. In that case, I usually get an ebook instead.

So Hanks’ reading is why I listened to The Dutch House, and as a first person narrative, Hanks gives the main character the best chance of being likeable. I mean, who doesn’t like Tom Hanks? (Other than QAnon I guess?) I have liked Tom Hanks since back in his “The Man With One Red Shoe” days. I remember a profile article (VF maybe?) that celebrated his Hasty Pudding award, and his infectious joy with everything.

So I don’t hate this book, and I don’t hate Danny Conroy.

I feel the need to put that out there as soon as possible, because apparently I hate everything.

I have also followed Ann Patchett since before she published Bel Canto. I really enjoyed The Patron Saint of Liars, and The Magician’s Assistant, although I read those decades ago now. I was less in love with Bel Canto, but thought Commonwealth was better.

In fact, somehow, Patchett managed to capture the exact quality of late afternoon light, slanting into a child’s bedroom at nap time, while adults outside were getting genially day drunk—-the first part of Commonwealth was an amazing evocation of a specific time and place and the book deserves to be read for that alone.

So, I also don’t hate Ann Patchett.

But I don’t like The Dutch House. And I can’t tell if it’s just that I don’t get it, or that I want more from Patchett than she gives.

The Dutch House is a story of a broken family, and the maturation of the narrator, one Danny Conroy, as he describes his life from the age of 5 until his 50s. It is a character description of his fierce and powerful older sister Maeve, and I guess also an exploration of unresolved grief?

Plot Summary

Although the plot spans decades, the focus is the singular trauma of the broken family, represented by The Dutch House—the extravagant mansion the Conroy family acquired before Danny was even born. It is called that because the family that built the house in the 1920s were Dutch—the Van Hoebeeks—rather than because of the architectural style. As central as the house is, Patchett is sparse with description, allowing the reader to imagine their own version of a magnificent house. There are at least 6 bedrooms, a ballroom on the 3rd floor, large “windows” (French doors) that open front and back, allowing one to see straight through from the front walk to the pool in the back. There is an observatory (really? I don’t think they mean a place with a telescope, since it’s on the first floor), a small kitchen, an embarrassingly ostentatious dining room, and two enormous full length portraits of the Van Hoebeeks.

Danny’s father, Cyril Conroy, purchased the entire house and furnishings at an auction in 1946, after the last of the Van Hoebeeks died. He bought it as a surprise for his wife Elna, transferring the family from a tiny house on a military base, to the ridiculous grandeur of this showplace.

Elna was overwhelmed by the house, by the new lifestyle, by her husband’s sudden and surprising excess. Elna had intended to be a nun, and was retrieved from the convent by Cyril who had decided that life was “not for her.” Elna believed they were poor, and spent her time frugally rationing even the light that illuminated the tiny house. She and Maeve would read inside a closet, with towels stuffed under the door to keep the light from leaking out and being wasted. She soaked pinto beans in water—cheap ingredients, but filling, until the day Cyril said “I’ve borrowed a car, let’s go for a ride” and presented her with the house.

He had apparently been saving money, perhaps already launched on his career of real estate management? The book is not terribly clear. The family moves in, Danny is born, and they acquire a staff—Sandy as housekeeper, Jocelyn as cook, and Fiona (“Fluffy”) as nanny. Cyril imports a famous painter from Chicago to paint Elna’s portrait with the intention of replacing the Van Hoebeeks with the Conroys.

Elna refuses.

Elna ultimately refuses everything, but she starts with refusing to be painted, so the painter (who had already been paid) paints 10 year old Maeve instead. Elna eventually refuses the entirety of the nouveau riche fantasy concocted by Cyril, and leaves the family entirely to go work with the poor in India. Danny is about 5 years old, and Maeve steps up and parents him as she is all of 12 at this point.

Before too long, in swoops Andrea and her two young daughters, and over time she displaces both Maeve and Danny from the house. Andrea marries Cyril during Maeve’s first year of college, and moves her older daughter (Norma ?) into Maeve’s room. Maeve is displaced up to a 3rd floor bedroom, and basically never comes home again. Cyril dies when Danny is 16, and Andrea evicts him from the Dutch House. Neither Danny nor Andrea goes back into the house for another 40 years, more or less.

They do go haunt the house, however. Whenever Danny comes home from school (Choate, Columbia for undergrad and medical school, all courtesy of an educational trust, which is all they inherit from their father, so they attempt to bleed it dry so it doesn’t go to Andrea’s daughters along with everything else), they go sit across the street and look at the house and reconstruct their lives, and nurse their grudges.

When Maeve hits her 50s, she has a stroke, and Elma Conroy returns. Danny has married, has a couple of kids, has never practiced medicine in favor of a real estate development career—the same one Cyril had. Elma moves in with Maeve, and for a year they both bask in a mother-daughter relationship that Danny resents. Then...Andrea again.

Elna suggests that they actually go and ring the doorbell at the Dutch House, make a visit. It turns out Andrea has some sort of brain degradation—dementia, or Alzheimer’s, something where she doesn’t know where she is. She sees the now middle-aged Danny, and believes it’s Cyril back. Elma volunteers to help care for Andrea, who is running through home health aides, and Norma had to give up her career in California to come back to talk care of her mother.

In an abbreviated coda, Elna moves back into the Dutch House, this time as a form of service. Maeve dies of a heart attack in her mid-50s, Danny and Celeste divorce, May becomes a successful movie actress. Andrea eventually dies, and neither of Andrea’s girls want the house. Danny’s daughter May buys it and reinstates the Gatsby-style parties that the Van Hoebeeks used to hold in the actual 1920s.

Analysis

What is this book about? Danny is not self-reflective enough to see his own arc, so it’s not really about the growth of the narrator.

• He describes the moment he realized that Sandy and Jocelyn were sisters, and he comments a couple of times about how it never occurred to him to wonder about their lives outside caring for him. He does reach this understanding when he is about 11, which seems developmentally appropriate, so I was anticipating that this might be a book about how he grew in empathy and understanding about his place in a larger social system.
• But when he gets divorced several decades later, he is surprised that his wife never liked the house he bought “for her.” Just as Cyril never understood that Elna didn’t like the Dutch House either.
• So he repeats the pattern, to a slightly better outcome? In that Celeste stays around until the kids are mostly grown? 

This is kind of a character study of Maeve, the indominable and constant family presence in Danny’s life. But we don’t get any sense of her internal life. Patchett gives her a house, a job, a degree, and sets her to caring for Danny. Which is not really enough. What she primarily does is lurk outside the Dutch House in the car.l
****

I started to re-listen to this book, as I finished it so long ago, and I am starting to see the shape of the book. Patchett is a thorough novelist, but I'm still wondering if I like this book.

The book is divided into three parts, and each of the parts really centers a different woman. Part 1 is the story of Danny and Maeve's stepmother Andrea. Her insinuation into their lives, capped by the death of Cyril and Andrea's insistence that Maeve take Danny out or the house.

Part 2 is Danny's beginning adulthood, meeting and marrying Celeste, learning about his parents from  Fluffy. Part 3 is the return of Elna. Maeve binds these stories together, because Danny never really sees what is going on around him, what roles the women have in shaping his life. He never sees them clearly. He doesn't spot that Sandy and Jocelyn are sisters, he is totally blind-sided by Andrea's dislike of him, he doesn't understand why Maeve responds to Elna's return.

The book starts with "The first time Andrea came into the house"--an excellent starting sentence. Textbook even. There are other wonderful lines. Danny describes sitting in the car with Maeve, outside the Dutch House as "We pretended what we lost was the house. Not our father and mother." (Roughly.)

But I'm still bothered by this book. There doesn't really seem to be any reason for it to exist. Why read it? Why write it? Why is Danny the narrator? Why does the book end the way it does, compressed time jump, to the unlikely result of May being a famous and rich movie actress? What happens to Norma and Bright, and why? Do things just happen, one after the other? Why does Danny tell this story? Why does Patchett?