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For Your Reading List The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett’s newest novel is not a fairy tale in the traditional sense, but it does have the stuff fairy tales are made of — a mansion, precocious siblings, a rags-to-riches story, and a wicked stepmother. Patchett blurs the genre with her classic brand of family saga — one full of richly developed characters and deeply felt observations on the connections between siblings and parents and spouses.
This story in particular is one about siblings. Danny Conroy, our narrator, and his sister Maeve grow up in the ornately decorated and elaborately designed Dutch House, a property outside of Philadelphia purchased by their real estate mogul father. But in the wake of their mother’s sudden departure and father’s untimely death, the Conroy siblings are forced out of their childhood home by their stepmother, and thus the reader follows Danny and Maeve through the next five decades as they attempt to rebuild their lives and escape their memories of the Dutch House, all while staying fiercely loyal to one another.
The Dutch House does not hinge on twists and turns — though figures from the Conroy siblings’ past do reappear as somewhat of a surprise later in the novel. Patchett takes her time with the story’s steady examination of family and childhood. While Danny oscillates between past and present as he recounts his tumultuous coming-of age, Patchett complicates the role of the narrator: “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.” The vast timespan of the novel becomes an act of introspection as we see Danny come to understand himself through the way he views his past.
There is truly so much to praise in Patchett’s writing — her unnervingly self-aware voice that brings Danny to life as our storyteller, the dry bursts of humor that she works into dialogue. But by far the most moving aspect of the book is Patchett’s depiction of the relationship between the novel’s central siblings. Perhaps it is unbelievable that through their lives, Danny and Maeve never seem to tire of each other or truly fight. But the palpable connection between the Conroy siblings is one of the most memorable portraits of familial love in recent fiction. Patchett’s strength lies in her ability to dissect the nuances of families broken by dysfunction like in her last novel Commonwealth. And as she weaves a story of siblings who become each other’s North Stars, Patchett adds another title to her collection of modern classics. Get your copy now. —Jillian Karande
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