Storied mansion
Patchett delivers fascinating peek inside a fairy tale
The Dutch House: A Novel Ann Patchett Harper
We remember our childhood homes because they were ours. What is it like to grow up in a home enchanting not only to us, but to everybody else? That’s a rich subject for Ann Patchett in her eighth novel, The Dutch House.
Maeve and Danny Conroy grow up in the storied Dutch House, a 1922 mansion in the Philadelphia suburbs commissioned by the Vanhoebeek family who made a fortune in cigarettes and filled it with European treasures, ornate mirrors, wood panelling, fanciful windows and blue Delft mantels “said to have been pried out of a castle in Utrecht and sold to the Vanhoebeeks to pay a prince’s gambling debts.” The Dutch House is the stuff of fairy tales, and Patchett’s plot sounds like one also. A mother who runs away from home, an orphaned sister and brother displaced by a grasping stepmother — bare summary sounds like melodrama, and this plot would devolve into cliché in the hands of a softer, more sentimental novelist. Patchett is made of sterner stuff.
Eight years younger than his sister, Maeve, Danny Conroy tells the story of his family in and outside The Dutch House. We see the mansion and its inhabitants through his young eyes, and then we revisit place and people as he grows. Like a gradually opening aperture, Danny’s narrow view of rooms and servants broadens to comprehend abandonment by Elna Conroy and the arrival of a brisk stepmother, Andrea, and her little girls Norma and Bright.
We watch Danny realize that his life is strange, his house extraordinary, that the rooms and people of his childhood are more complex than he imagined. His family’s faithful servants Sandy and Jocelyn are sisters. To his shame, he had “never wondered who they were related to or who they went home to.” Most important, we see Maeve through Danny’s eyes, as he grows from dependence to mature appreciation of his brilliant older sister. Danny narrates this story, but Maeve is its heroine — Danny’s protector, teacher, confidante and closest friend. We watch in horror and fascination as Andrea supplants the absent Elna, and Norma moves into Maeve’s room with its curtained window seat — a perfect detail straight from another orphan tale, Jane Eyre. We feel for brother and sister as they return, like Hansel and Gretel, after their father’s death to gaze at The Dutch House and try to make sense of their past.
Above all, we come to understand the bond between brother and sister. This is the central relationship of the novel — more durable for these two than any other friendship or romantic attachment. Patchett dramatizes this sibling bond as beautiful, necessary and dangerous.
Danny does grow up and marry, but this is the true romance of his life, this love triangle — brother, sister, gorgeous house. This is the novel’s beating heart.