The Dutch House by Ann Patchett - review

Few things are more ominous for children of a freshly single parent than being summoned to meet “a new friend” of their now eligible father’s. And so Ann Patchett’s latest novel begins, as Danny and Maeve Conroy prepare for their first encounter with Andrea, the woman who will, quite deliciously, morph into the most evil of stepmothers.

“If my body of work has one glaring shortcoming,” Patchett has said, “it is my inability to write villains.” In The Dutch House, the seventh novel from the Orange Prize-winning author, she has put this to rights, with a dark modern fairytale, a delicately woven portrait of a family in flux, narrated by Danny across five decades of loyalty, betrayal and changing fortunes.

As the book opens, the siblings are reeling from the recent departure of their mother, Elna, and the subsequent emotional abandonment of their father, Cecil, a man who has made a small fortune building a property empire throughout Pennsylvania. After a series of canny investments, he was able to surprise Elna with the titular Dutch House, a “marvel beyond what any of them had imagined”. And yet “The Dutch House… referred not to the house’s architecture but to its inhabitants.”

For Cecil, the house is a symbol of success; for Elna it was a prison, shaming her with its grandeur (“I had no business in a place like that ... all those people waiting on me”). She flees, and no sooner has a new young bride been installed in her place than Cecil dies and the Conway children are banished. For them, then, the house becomes an obsession.

Much of the book is a meditation on how profound loss colours every subsequent relationship. The siblings’ deep bond is forged through the absence of their former home; hours are spent sitting in a car outside the house. “It’s like you’re Hansel and Gretel,” Danny’s wife, accuses him, accurately. For Maeve, meanwhile, the loss of her mother is inextricably linked to her own exile and the house becomes the embodiment of her pain: ‘‘‘[Andrea] stole from us, do you not understand that? They’re sleeping in our beds and eating off our plates and we will never get any of it back.’ I nodded. What I wanted to say was that I’d been thinking the same thing about our father. We would never get him back.”

In a particularly poignant scene Danny is thrown when he, late in life, realises the two servants he was raised with were sisters. But he recovers, absolved by one of them: “Sandy shook her head. ‘Boys,’ she said, and with that single word excused me from all responsibility”. It’s a slow burn, at times lacking pace, and the ending is a tad twee. But for Patchett fans who have been waiting for years, it’s a worthwhile read.

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett​ (Bloomsbury, £18.99), buy it here.