Ann Patchett: "The Dutch House"

Ann Patchett has written several books that I find amazing and wonderful, especially Bel Canto (2001; I haven't seen the movie which came out last year). Her newest novel is The Dutch House, published a few weeks ago. I find her work as good as ever.

Above all: Patchet portrays characters vividly. They are astonishingly vivid! And in each of her books, you find a kind of fairy-tale starting point, a fairy tale where the vivid characters figure out how to be real: how to live and manage in their extraordinary circumstances. (All the reviews I read, after writing this, also called it a fairy tale.)

The Dutch House tells the tale of an evil stepmother for our time. A bit like Cinderella, a bit like Hansel and Gretel, somewhat further away from Snow White.

What do evil step mothers do? They quietly abuse their step-children under the purblind eyes of the uncomprehending father (usually besotted or enchanted by the stepmother). The stepmother captures his love and loyalty. Then she takes control. Somehow she throws the step-kids out. Yup. That's the plot here.

Events for the family in The Dutch House start in the late 1940s and continue for around 50 years. The father is a very rich father, as befits a fairy tale. The character who narrates The Dutch House is the younger of the two step-children, a boy who is around nine years younger than his older sister. She remembers their birth mother. He cannot remember her. Neither of them really understands why she left them or knows where she went, only that she is has disappeared. Their father is distant, and then remarries Andrea -- a woman who clearly wants only his money and privilege for her two daughters. (They aren't actually named Anastasia and Drizella like those of Disney's Cinderella, and they aren't as mean).

They all live in a opulent house that had been built in the 1920s by very rich people who all died. Their father had purchased the house with all the former owners' possessions, even their portraits on the walls, their clothing in the closets, and a hair brush with hair in it on the dresser. Even three servants of the former owners, Fluffy, Sandy, and Jocelyn, became the loyal caretakers of the children. When the father dies, children and servants are all thrown out of the house because Andrea wants everything.

Patchett knows how to tell a story, how to set everything up so you see the child in the man who later narrates the tale. Once the book gets going, it's all about the narrator's piece by piece discovery of who he is, how he feels, and what was the real story of his mother and his father. I'm not going to tell much of it, because that's the real plot. I'm sure you don't want spoilers. Surely you will read it for yourself!

One of the key passages, fairly early in the tale, describes the moment when the narrator and his sister Maeve are forced to baby sit for Andrea's two daughters, who are then small children. They take them on a tour of the entire house, which firmly shows the reader its permanent importance. In the basement:

"Maeve went bravely ahead while Norma and Bright and I tried to stay in the general vicinity of her flashlight’s beam. She opened a wooden door that creaked so loudly the girls pressed against me for a second, then Maeve pulled another string, illuminating yet another bare lightbulb. 'This is the basement pantry where the extra food is kept, just in case you’re here and get hungry. Sandy and Jocelyn make pickles and jams and stewed tomatoes. Pretty much anything that goes in a jar.' We looked up at the shelves of immaculate jars, every one labeled with a date and organized by color, golden peach halves floating in syrup, raspberry jam. There were crates of sweet potatoes and russets and onions on the cold floor. I had never exactly thought of being rich until then, seeing all that food stored away in the presence of those little girls." (Kindle Locations 471-477).

Somehow jars of food and gifts of food become a kind of metaphor for a lot of things in the book, as did the loyalty and effectiveness of Sandy and Jocelyn. Slowly the narrator realizes that they are real people with real feelings and real lives, but at first he sees them as an assumed part of life:

"Sandy and Jocelyn had always run the house with complete autonomy. Maybe on occasion we would tell them how nice it would be to have beef stew with dumplings again, or that wonderful apple cake, but even that was rare. They knew what we liked and they gave it to us without our needing to ask. We never ran out of apples or crackers, there were always stamps in the left-hand drawer of the library desk, clean towels in the bathroom. Sandy ironed not only our clothes but our sheets and pillowcases." (Kindle Locations 681-685).

But the stepmother destroys this idyll:

"All of that changed after Andrea arrived. She made weekly menus for Jocelyn to follow and gave her opinion on every course: there wasn’t enough salt in the soup; she had given the girls too many mashed potatoes. How could they be expected to eat so many mashed potatoes? Why was Jocelyn serving cod when Andrea had specifically told her sole? Could she not have troubled herself to check another market?" (Kindle Locations 687-690).

After they are kicked out of the house, the narrator and his sister still see Sandy and Jocelyn from time to time, and he begins to understand what these "servants" had done for them:

"Sandy and Jocelyn hugged us and kissed us in a way they never had at home. Jocelyn was wearing dungarees and Sandy had on a cotton skirt with cheap tennis shoes. They were regular people now, not the people who worked for us. Still, they handed over one big jar of minestrone soup (Maeve’s favorite) and another of beef stew (mine)." (Kindle Locations 1432-1434).

Slowly he grows into the full understanding of the love and security that he and his sister lose, for their mother's love, and for the entire house which somehow dominates them even as they develop into adults with distinct and interesting personalities, and especially as he becomes the head of his own family with his own wife, daughter and son. But the house means everything to them, and they can't get away from it. I especially love the way that the book continues throughout so many years of the narrator's life. I would tell you how it ends, and what happens with the house, but that would be a spoiler. It's another fabulous book by a great author.

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