{"id":8214,"date":"2019-09-30T11:24:53","date_gmt":"2019-09-30T11:24:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8214"},"modified":"2019-10-07T10:56:36","modified_gmt":"2019-10-07T10:56:36","slug":"the-dutch-house-by-ann-patchett","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8214","title":{"rendered":"The Dutch House by Ann Patchett"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Bloomsbury (UK)\/HarperCollins (US) 24 September 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

352pp, hardback, \u00a318.99\/$27.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n


\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

A new novel from award-winning Ann Patchett (author of seven previous novels, including Bel Canto<\/em> and Commonwealth<\/em>) is quite something to look forward to.\u00a0 Here, she writes of family ties coming undone, of the lifelong impact of childhood experience, of the power of place – and of love – in our lives.\u00a0 She asks a question about maternal responsibility that remains, in the end, unresolved.\u00a0 Not for nothing does Patchett have a reputation for painful as well as compelling storytelling.<\/p>\n

Narrator Danny Conroy is a property developer in Manhattan.\u00a0 Buildings obsess him, and none more so than the strange house in which he was brought up.\u00a0 Known as \u2018the Dutch House\u2019, his baroque childhood home was the scene both of painful rupture and of vigilant care, the latter from Danny\u2019s older sister, Maeve, and from the household servants.\u00a0 The mother, Elna, has left. \u00a0The father, Cyril, himself a property developer, thinks only of buildings, repairs and rent-collection.\u00a0 Maeve is the one who gets Danny off to school and looks after him in every other way, as a mother would.\u00a0 It is a story of terrible neglect and unbreakable loyalty. It is also an object lesson in how we become what we are.\u00a0 The one thing that keeps Maeve going is the care she once received from her mother before she \u2018went crazy\u2019.\u00a0 The very foundation of Danny\u2019s life is the business of real estate, the only thing his father taught him.<\/p>\n

As we follow the story, it becomes clear that a mistake was made, way back, when Cyril \u2018rescued\u2019 his friend\u2019s sister from a convent and married her. \u00a0Had he not gone overboard for the exaggeratedly grand Dutch House, she might have stayed, and her children\u2019s lives been different.\u00a0 As it is, her son and daughter, largely cut out of their father\u2019s legacy by a second wife, choose lives that are essentially versions of waiting for their mother to come back. Maeve, a first-rate mathematician, spends her entire working life in one local food company.\u00a0 Danny trains to be a doctor but never practises, diving sideways instead into the world of buildings.\u00a0 Whenever they get the chance, they go back to the Dutch House and sit in Maeve\u2019s car, remembering it.<\/p>\n

A story of loss, of ghosts, of what Danny calls \u2018a house on fire\u2019, The Dutch House<\/em> brings closure of a sort but is not shy of leaving the facts of pain exposed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/p>\n

[Patchett] writes of family ties coming undone, of the lifelong impact of childhood experience, of the power of place – and of love – in our lives. She asks a question about maternal responsibility that remains, in the end, unresolved. Not for nothing does Patchett have a reputation for painful as well as compelling storytelling […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8214"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8216,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8214\/revisions\/8216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}