Compassion Disguised as Nostalgia

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 Ann Patchett

ISBN: 9780062963673

Publication Date: 2019-09-24

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize New York Times Bestseller | A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick | A New York Times Book Review Notable Book | TIME Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2019 Named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, The Washington Post; O: The Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, Vogue, Refinery29, and Buzzfeed Ann Patchett, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth, delivers her most powerful novel to date: a richly moving story that explores the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go. The Dutch House is the story of a paradise lost, a tour de force that digs deeply into questions of inheritance, love and forgiveness, of how we want to see ourselves and of who we really are. At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. The story is told by Cyril's son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakeable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures. Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they're together. Throughout their lives they return to the well-worn story of what they've lost with humor and rage. But when at last they're forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.