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. Seen from certain vantage points of distance, it appeared to float several inches above the hill it sat on. The panes of glass that surrounded the glass front doors were as big as storefront windows and held in place by wrought-iron vines. The windows both took in the sun and reflected it back across the wide lawn. Maybe it was neoclassical, though with with a simplicity in the lines that came closer to Mediterranean or French, and while it was not Dutch, the blue delft mantels in the drawing room, library, and master bedroom were said to have been pried out of a castle in Utrecht and sold to the VanHoebeeks to pay a prince's gambling debts.
When I was a young mother, my parents completed the construction of their dream house, two thousand kilometres away from me and my brothers (and my kids) and they took early retirement and moved away. Over the years and as our families grew, if me and my brothers wanted our parents to know their grandkids, we would need to make the long drive to their home by the lake and thus spend every summer vacation. Inevitably, every year, at some point when everyone's kids had been tucked into their beds, my brothers and I, sitting around the campfire and a few beers in, would start to complain about the kind of parents we had had; let's just say that it wasn't totally surprising for them to have been able to leave us as they did. And one year at the campfire – I don't even remember which one of them said it – one of our spouses griped, “Here we go, the Jones kids unearthing their miserable childhood again.” And that was fair, but we couldn't stop ourselves – I know that for me, everything I had ever felt about our parents had become tied up with that faraway house by the lake and I, year after year, resented being there and it brought up everything long-buried all over again. And so it goes in Ann Patchett's The Dutch House: Having been raised in a uniquely opulent house, siblings Danny and Maeve Conroy so identify the Dutch House with their parents (and their parents' individual relationships with the house) that every time they get together in their hometown the pair inevitably drives to their old neighbourhood and park outside their former home in order to rehash the past and try to figure out the puzzle that was their parents. This is a family drama and a finely observed character study, and although some surprising events do occur, I was mostly surprised by the very human (often conflicting) ways that Patchett has her characters react to these events. I loved every bit of this and will make this review spoiler-free. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
“Jesus,” Celeste said later when I was trying to tell her the story. “It's like you're Hansel and Gretel. You just keep walking through the dark woods holding hands no matter how old you get. Do you ever get tired of reminiscing?”The Dutch House is narrated by Danny over the span of fifty years, moving backwards and forwards through time. I liked that this was told only from Danny's POV: as a much younger sibling, he had always been protected by his sister, and maybe it was because he was sheltered or maybe it was because he was a boy, but he had been so incurious about his parents as people when he was growing up that he learns many things late in life and these details become surprising to the reader as well (although they had always been known to Maeve, Danny only needed to ask). In a way, each of the siblings grows up to be like their parents (Maeve big-hearted and charitable like their mother, Danny acquisitive and emotionally walled-off like their dad) even if they don't recognise it, and although Maeve eventually learns to let go of her resentments, Danny nurtures his and refuses to forgive (and again, it's interesting to wonder whether that's because of his sheltered upbringing or intrinsic to his nature).
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.Much that's magical about this book lies in the nature of memory and knowing and acceptance. Many parts made me smile and a couple of parts brought me to tears; I recognised myself in these pages and I enjoyed the whole thing.
