THE DUTCH HOUSE
Reviewers settled back to enjoy the new novel by American Ann Patchett. In the New Statesman, Erica Wagner likened the experience of reading a Patchett to ‘climbing into a luxury automobile and hitting the road on a perfect day’.
The Dutch House of the title (an old mansion in the suburbs of Philadelphia) is the star of the novel. As Anna Mundow noted in the Wall
Street Journal, ‘The dominant figure is in many ways the house itself, a captivating childhood home that later becomes, as one character puts it, “the hero of every story, our lost and beloved country”.’ For Wagner ‘the question of what makes a home pervades this gripping book’. It is ‘an examination of the dynamics of an American family in the middle years of the 20th century’ and, tellingly, it opens with ‘siblings parked outside a house filled with light, they in the dark’.
Ann Treneman in the Times loved the way Patchett revealed the house ‘like an estate agent practising to be a magician, pulling rooms out of a hat: here the imposing dining room, there the cosy scullery’. Treneman also enjoyed the characters of Danny and Maeve, the siblings ‘who show us how life can be lived, enjoyed even, certainly laughed about, when someone as vital as a mother is missing’. In Metro, however, The
Dutch House didn’t quite work for Anthony Cummins: ‘While Patchett rivals Anne Tyler for emotional acuity, she gambles on getting by without her vital comic spark, which means a certain earnestness hangs over the enterprise.’
‘The question of what makes a home pervades this gripping book’