Abandoned children, a creepy house and a wicked stepmother... but this is no fairy tale

The Dutch House

Ann Patchett

Bloomsbury €26.99

The most memorable houses in literature tend to be spooky, in one way or another. Like beautiful monsters, they pull their past inhabitants back, often against their will. ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,’ is the famous opening line of Daphne du Maurier’s creepy study in jealousy, Rebecca.

We think of Miss Havisham mouldering in the cobwebby gloom of Satis House in Dickens’s Great Expectations, or Evelyn Waugh’s Charles Ryder finding himself back at Brideshead, or even Count Dracula feasting on blood in Castle Dracula ‘from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky’.

The Dutch House is not only the title, but the location, and, in a curious way, also the principal character of Ann Patchett’s latest novel.

‘I was still at a point in my life when the house was the hero of every story, our lost and beloved country,’ says the narrator, Danny, who, together with his sister, has been booted out of this large, imposing mansion near Philadelphia by his grabby stepmother at the age of 15, following the sudden death of his father.

His frosty father was a property developer who, having got rich quick, bought the Dutch House, and all its contents, as a surprise for his wife, Danny’s mother. At first, she thinks he has brought her into a library or a museum: it is decorated with dozens of family portraits of the previous owners, ‘stern and unlovely’. When he reveals that this is where they will be living as a family, she is horrified.

‘He’d bought the most beautiful house in Pennsylvania, and his wife was looking at him like he’d shot her.’

They move in. The mother bolts, leaving Danny and his elder sister Maeve in the care of the father and two servants. The father remarries. His new wife, the cold-hearted Andrea, favours her own two children over her stepchildren. The father has a heart attack and dies. Danny and Maeve find themselves banished from their own home.

Over a period of years, then decades, Danny and Maeve make a habit of driving back to sit and stare at the house through the linden trees. The house becomes the focus and repository of their memories, their griefs and their sense of loss.

In middle age, Danny reflects: ‘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. We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. We pretended that what we had lost had been taken from us by the person who still lived inside.’

Ann Patchett is still probably best known for her fourth novel Bel Canto, which won the Orange Prize for fiction in 2001. It is a melodramatic tale of a diverse group of people at a party

in an embassy in South America who are taken hostage by a group of ter rorists. Two love stories develop: one, between a Japanese multi-million aire and an opera singer, the other between the millionaire’s translator and loved one it, but I struggled to believe a of the terrorists. Other people word of it

I read Bel Canto having enjoyed another novel by Ann Patchett Commonwealth, which my daughter had recommended. Commonwealth has a much more down-to-earth naret in middle-class America, rative, snaret in middle-class America about a chance encounter that breaks

‘He’d bought the most beautiful house… and his wife was looking at him like he’d shot her’

mbassy in South America who n hostage by a group of terTwo love stories develop: one, n a Japanese multi-milliond an opera singer, the other n the millionaire’s translator of the terrorists. Other people but I struggled to believe a it. d Bel Canto having enjoyed novel by Ann Patchett, nwealth, which my daughter ommended. Commonwealth uch more down-to-earth naret in middle-class America, chance encounter that breaks up two families, sending them to opposite sides of the country. The novel charts the impact of that chance encounter on different generations over the next five decades. It’s moving and absorbing, and beautifully constructed, with none of the artificial rat-a-tat-tat box-set dramatics of Bel Canto.

The Dutch House gets off to such a slow start that, after 50 pages or so, I was finding it hard to keep tabs on who all the characters were, and began to wish they would get on with whatever they were going to do. I’m ashamed to say that I even asked my daughter, who had already read it, if there was a murder or a kidnap to look forward to.

But then, all of a sudden, everything came into focus. The central relationship is between the narrator and his sister, as the two plot against the mean stepmother. As in Commonwealth, Ann Patchett is wonderfully astute about siblings – their power struggles and their mutual dependence, the way they so easily slip into the roles of the bossy and the bossed, the driver and the passenger.

Siblings often become the curators of each other’s memories, endlessly rewriting and reinterpreting versions of events that occurred long ago. As they sit staring at their old house through the window of their car, Danny’s sister Maeve says ‘I see the past as it actually was,’ but Danny contradicts her: ‘But we overlay the present on to 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.’ Maeve contrives a means by which Danny can extract the maximum amount of money possible from their stepmother. Though she has kicked them out of the house, with no money, their late father has set aside a trust for their education. ‘You can be anything you want,’ says Maeve, ‘as long as it requires a great deal of schooling.’ So Maeve determines that Danny enrols in an expensive medical school, regardless of whether he wants to become a doctor or not. Patchett’s books are not exactly humorous, but they have a sly comic undertow. She is happy to turn received ideas on their head. Thus, though Danny completes his training as a doctor, he has always nursed an ambition to become a property developer, just like his father. His heart and soul lie in this most scorned of professions. And, once he has closed his first deal on a building, he feels liberated: ‘I was not a doctor. I was, at last, myself.’

Of course, all his decisions in life have been, consciously or unconsciously, dictated both by the loss of his mother, and the loss of his home. His wife is merciless in her dissection of the instincts of Danny and his sister, scorning their urge to revisit their family home. ‘You two park in front of the old homestead because it reminds her of her mother, you go through life like your wrists are bound together with wire because you were abandoned by your mother.’ At another point, she complains: ‘Jesus, 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?’

However gothic the story – and, after its sluggish start, it grows steadily more outlandish, so that you have to fight the urge to say: ‘But hang on – you can’t expect me to believe they’d behave like THAT!’ – it’s true to say there are skeletons in the closets of most families, fuelling grudges born of feuds from long ago. As Alan Bennett once said: ‘Every family has a secret, and the secret is that it’s not like other families.’

In a discreet literary reference, Patchett mentions that two of the characters share the same favourite book – Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. This, too, is a novel about two orphans, and their lifelong struggle against their sense of abandonment.

‘Families will not be broken,’ writes Robinson. ‘Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs out of all these sorrows and sit in the porches and sing them on mild evenings.’

‘It gets off to a slow start… but then all of a sudden everything came into focus’