Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House is my first foray into the author’s seven novels. I’d seen the author’s name on bestseller lists, but I never had the desire to check her out until my sisters urged me to listen to the audiobook narrated in first-person by Tom Hanks. The Dutch House is a small story with a huge lesson (hear me out, it isn’t preachy in the least) in compassion. David Foster Wallace composed perhaps the most compelling reason for practicing putting one’s self in the shoes of another with his famous commencement speech This is Water, while Patchett’s prose encourages compassion as siblings Danny and Maeve struggle to understand why their mother left them at ages three and ten respectively. And Tom Hanks’ Danny provides first-person narration, which lifts this little story to huge heights.
Built in 1922 by a wealthy Dutch couple, the Dutch House is lavishly designed with six bedrooms, a ballroom, an ornate dining room ceiling, and a window-seat coveted by both Maeve and the stepmom’s daughter. Cyril Conroy, the family’s patriarch and real estate mogul, surprise buys the home for wife Elna who hates its gaudiness and opulence, so much so that she hightails it outta there and lands in India where missionary work is her calling. Unrelated foreigners earn Elna’s compassion, while her children remain behind wondering what caused her departure. Most compelling are Danny and Maeve’s parked-outside-the-Dutch-House discussions where nostalgia grabs hold. Philosophically, Danny questions if he can “ever see the past as it actually was.” The “it” I interpret thus: Elna loves her children, but she was an individual person before she birthed two children. Living in the thrust-upon-her Dutch House proved too much for her simple sensibilities. Critics have faulted Patchett’s first-person narrative for its sentimentality, but I see it differently: Sentiment here is compassion. Maeve forgives her mother’s absence, and they forge a relationship that, under typical mother-daughter relationships, might not have transpired. Danny’s hatred (a strong word, yes, but fitting here) for step-monster, Andrea dissipates in an unlikely encounter that’s best left to Hanks’ compelling voice. Whether or not Danny and Maeve return to the Dutch House is beside the point when the point is compassion. I told you at the outset of this blog that Patchett isn’t preachy; in fact, she channels David Foster Wallace’s thesis when he speaks of the difficulty in “choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of [his] natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.” Wallace acknowledges that NOT being self-centered is hard. Patchett’s characters do too as Danny and Maeve adjust their “default-setting [s]” by the novel’s end.
The Dutch House by