The Dutch House

I am quite certain that The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett, will be the best book I've  read all year, maybe the best in the last two or three years. It reminds me of the work by John Irving, one of my favorite novelists, in that it's a story of a broken family, but Patchett doesn't resort to twee additions like bears.

It concerns siblings Danny and Maeve, and the house itself, which is a character all itself. "The Dutch House was the place where those Dutch people with the unpronounceable name lived. Seen from certain vantage points of distance, it appeared to float several inches above the hill it sat on."

The novel, narrated by Danny, begins when he is seven years old, and Maeve is fourteen. It will cover over forty years in their lives, long after they have left the house, but it always remain a fixture in their lives. 

The house was beloved by their father, but their mother hates its osentatious ornamaentation. She prefers the much smaller but cozier house they lived in on a military bases. She hates the house, and the accompanying lifestyle so much that she leaves, setting off for India to help the poor. Maeve is made ill by this departure, while  Danny never got to know her, and has a close attachment to the servants, who raise him.

The children are surprised when their father remarries, not so much for love but he's found a woman who likes the house. She is Andrea, who will turn out to be the wicked stepmother. First she gives Maeve's bedroom to her own daughter, but upon the father's premature death, surprises them by kicking them out. The father put everything in her name.

The siblings move on. Maeve, a genius at math, becomes the indispensable accountant at a frozen vegetable company. Danny goes to medical school, but doesn't become a doctor, much to the distress of his future wife, Celeste (they meet cute on a train when she notices his chemistry textbook). He instead gets into the real estate business, which was his father's business. He buys up apartment buildings in Harlem and fixes them up.

All the while the siblings are drawn back to the house, sometimes just sitting in a parked car outside it, reminiscing. Danny recalls a typical day: "Sandy and Jocelyn in the kitchen laughing while I sat at the blue table doing homework, my father with his coffee and cigarette in the morning in the dining room, a folded newspaper in his hand, Andrea tapping across the marble floor of the foyer, Norma and Bright laughing as they ran up the stairs, Maeve a schoolgirl, her black hair like a blanket down her back."

The main reason I loved this book is that is a delicate mixture of laugh out loud funny and a wistful melancholy. The end, which frankly I foresaw, may make you cry. It is also one of the best books about a brother and sister. Maeve is a great character who I think I would have been in love with had I known her. I don't have a big sister, but if did I'd want one like Maeve, who looks after Danny with the ferocity of a mama bear watching after its cub. When she is present in the book it reaches its greatest heights.

Patchett is also a gifted stylist. The language is fairly straightforward, no real flights of verbosity, but perfectly crafted. Consider this passage, in which Danny describes his father so well that we immediately know him: "For the most part, what I knew about my father was what I saw: he was tall and thin with weathered skin and hair the color of rust, the color of my hair. All three of us had blue eyes. His left knee was slow to bend, worse in the winter and when it rained. He never said a word about it but it was easy enough to tell when it hurt him. He smoked Pall Malls, put milk in his coffee, worked the crossword puzzle before reading the front page. He loved buildings the way boys loved dogs.

I don't reread many books, but The Dutch House is one I may return to someday. It accomplishes what the best fiction does: you don't want it to end, and you feel happy to be among these characters.