Maeve pulls the car up on VanHoebeek Street, cuts the engine, and lights a cigarette, and she and her younger brother sit there looking at the house they were thrown out of. They do this for thirty years. Not as a single dramatic pilgrimage but as a standing appointment, the way other families go to church, parked across from a glass-fronted mansion outside Philadelphia while the seasons change the hedges and nothing at all changes inside them. Patchett builds a five-decade novel out of that one repeated scene, and the trick of it is that the conversation in the car is always more or less the same conversation. What shifts is how much it has cost them.
The house is called the Dutch House because the people who built it were Dutch, made a fortune in tobacco, and then died, leaving their portraits on the walls and their china in the cupboards. Cyril Conroy buys it furnished, portraits included, as a surprise for his wife. Elna takes one look at the ballroom-sized rooms and the servants and understands that her husband has installed her in a museum. She leaves for India and does not come back for a very long time. Her daughter is ten. Her son is three. Everything that happens afterward in these 352 pages is the interest accruing on that departure, and Patchett is unsentimental about how compound the interest gets.
Danny narrates, and the choice is doing more work than it looks like it is. He is comfortable, a little slow on the uptake about the women in his life, and content to let Maeve do the strategic thinking for both of them. So the reader keeps catching what he misses. Maeve's diabetes and the bookkeeping job she is overqualified for. What it means that she engineers his medical degree mostly as an act of theft from their stepmother, and what it means that he goes along with it and then never practices medicine. Sandy and Jocelyn, the cook and the housekeeper, who know the whole story and tell it in fragments over decades. Patchett writes plain, exact sentences with no visible effort in them, which is the hardest kind to write and the easiest kind to underrate.
Andrea, the stepmother, is the one place the book keeps its distance. She arrives as a fairy tale figure and stays one, all appetite and no interior, and readers who want her explained will not get it. That is a deliberate choice, since the whole novel is told by two people who have spent their lives making her into a villain, and it means the story runs on grievance more than on plot. Very little happens. Some readers find the pace slack, and I understand why; if you want incident, this is a book about two adults driving to a street and sitting in a car. What kept me reading was the accuracy. The way an old injury becomes a shared hobby. The way a sibling can be the great love of your life and also the reason your marriage is thin.
Why you should read
- Fans of Commonwealth and Patchett's other family novels
- Readers who take character over plot every time
- Anyone who loves a house that behaves like a person
- Book clubs ready to argue about forgiveness
What to expect
- Fifty years told in loops rather than a straight line
- Slow, low-incident storytelling driven by character
- A narrator who understands less than his sister does
- Plain, exact prose with no showing off
Then Patchett does the thing she does better than almost anyone working, which is to let forgiveness arrive on terms nobody agreed to. It is not offered evenly, it is not deserved in any tidy sense, and one of these two is far more capable of it than the other. I finished the last chapter and sat there startled at how far a novel with so little happening in it had gotten under my skin. Two people in a parked car, looking at a house, telling each other a story they already know by heart, for the rest of their lives.
