The Dutch House

By Ann Patchett, Harper, 2019, 352 pages
Reviewed by Ted Streuli, Sept. 13, 2020

"The Dutch House" teaches us what makes a home a house.

The always-protected Danny and his older sister, the ardently protective Maeve, grew up in the favored symbol of white American financial success, a palatial house in the suburbs. The Dutch House. Acquired by their self-made father whose one good investment was parlayed into a real estate empire, the house was a statement to the world that Cyril Conroy had made it. And he spent a lot of time passing his knowledge along to Danny, taking his son along to collect rent at the apartments he owned, teaching him how to be both a good businessman and a good person, all with a heavy dose of American bootstrapisms, such as the passage in which he tells Danny:

The biggest lie in business is that it takes money to make money, remember that. You gotta be smart, have a plan, pay attention to what's going on around you. None of that costs a dime.

We’re reminded that a residence, whether it’s a grand mansion or a humble apartment, is nothing more than a place for people to live and the majesty of the brickwork has nothing to do with the warmth inside. When Danny and Maeve lose their mother, Cyril remarries, choosing a woman who is pleasant enough for company and selfish enough to grab the glass slipper for her own offspring. The cold that creeps in appears in contrast to the warmth of their father and the love evidenced in the apartments he visits with Danny.

Even so, when Cyril dies Danny and Maeve’s eviction from the Dutch House comes as a surprise to both the reader and the characters. Their resentment carries through the decades (“We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it.”) until the siblings are forced to finally confront the woman responsible for their anger and their view of their own pasts.

But we overlay the present onto 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.

Patchett wants us to take a look back and ask whether the way we remember it is the way it really was. I was reminded of the only fight my parents had, at least the only one of which I was aware, and how hard they worked to shield me from both the argument and the revelation that caused it. It was one of many truths from which I was shielded but as I aged and learned more facts I was forced to refocus history’s lens just as Danny and Maeve must, because the house that they mourned for so many years wasn’t really what they’d lost.

We have to ask if our families were as normal as we assumed or if we were the dysfunctional ones after all. And it is so much more pleasant, so much easier, to retain the historical fictions we construct.

“The Dutch House” is a terrific story but if you go in for audio books there’s a bonus: Danny, the narrator, is played by Tom Hanks, who makes a good book even better.