LITERARY FICTION
THE DUTCH HOUSE by Ann Patchett
(Bloomsbury £18.99, 336 pp) ANN PATCHETT is a terrific novelist to have in your back pocket — an Orange Prizewinning storyteller whose reliably sympathetic novels get right inside the mysterious bonds and fractures that make up American family life. Still, I’m not sure her most recent is her best.
It’s narrated by Danny, who is three when his mother leaves, not much older when his beloved father marries again, and 15 when his father dies.
His controlling stepmother promptly disinherits Danny and his adored older sister, Maeve, forcing both to leave the Dutch-style mansion his father painstakingly restored and forge a new life.
As the years pass, both siblings become parents to each other, even while Danny has a career and family and Maeve devotes much of her time to good works.
Yet the Dutch house and its unresolved histories pervade their souls like a ghost.
Patchett’s portrayal of the many alternative ways one person can care for another in this world is interesting, but, after a glittering start, the momentum of this sprawling novel fatally ebbs.
WILL by Jeroen Olyslaegers
(Pushkin £14.99, 352 pp) INSPIRED by the author’s grandfather, this book has won prizes in the Netherlands for the way that it confronts Flanders’ dark history of collaboration in World War II.
Although it takes place mainly on the streets of Antwerp in the early Forties, it is directly concerned with legacy and takes the form of a confession presented years later by a former Antwerp policeman to his great-grandson.
Wilfried is a lowly cop whose callow belligerence belies his private persona as a poet when occupying German forces insist the native police help them round up the city’s Jewish population.
His best friend and colleague Lode hides a Jew in his house, but Wilfried is keen to keep on side his mentor Meanbeard, whose antisemitism is borderline psychopathic.
Olyslaegers doesn’t encourage us to judge Wilfried as he witnesses Jews being hounded from their homes and suspected traitors being tortured by police. Instead, his experience becomes ours as we are plunged into the moment alongside him.
This is a violently atmospheric novel that not only asks the big, implicating questions about the shadowy terrain of appeasement, but also presents it as a sickness, infecting not just the guilty, but future generations, too.
BEFORE THE COFFEE GETS COLD by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
(Pan £8.99, 224 pp) THIS silly little Japanese novel is about an unobtrusive cafe in Tokyo that can transport its customers back to the past.
There are several conditions attached, however: the time traveller will be unable to effect any change on the present and can stay in the past only for as long as it takes for a cup of coffee to cool.
Such limitations, though, don’t stop girlfriends, wives and mothers clamouring to make the journey to question estranged lovers, stricken husbands and unknown daughters in the pursuit of reconciliation.
If this novel has a point, it’s that the regrets we may have about our life invariably stem from an illusion we hold about it, and that simply by being more empathetic and less judgmental, we can make the necessary changes ourselves.
But the writing is bloodless, the characters are as insubstantial as paper and the metaphysics as fragile as cherry blossom.