THE DUTCH HOUSE

By Ann Patchett

It takes guts to write a fairy tale these days. No P.R. blurb is complete without the descriptors “searing,” “probing,” “challenging” or the like. The use of destabilizing narrative techniques (which often force critics to either include spoilers or to be oblique in order to avoid them) is so prevalent as to seem almost de rigueur. At a moment when everything in the world feels on the verge of falling apart, there seems to be a widespread cultural expectation (in the West, anyway) that serious art — the kind worthy of respect, in books, television, film or theater — is gonna make you sweat, that it should make you sweat.

Ann Patchett doesn’t want to make you sweat. She wants to make you care. As she explained in a 2016 profile in The Guardian, “I’ve been writing the same book my whole life — that you’re in one family, and all of a sudden, you’re in another family and it’s not your choice and you can’t get out.” In “The Dutch House,” the family is built both by blood and by love. And isn’t that what fairy tales are made of? This novel takes a winding road through the forest and doesn’t rush to a finish, nor is the ending wholly surprising. But if you allow yourself to walk along with Patchett, you’ll find riches at the end of the trail. And you won’t end up shoved into an oven.

I make the Hansel and Gretel reference deliberately. “The Dutch House” is a sibling story — that of Maeve and Danny Conroy, a brother and sister growing up comfortable in Elkins Park, Pa., in a house known throughout the community (and by the family) as the Dutch House, in homage to the Netherlands-born VanHoebeeks, the previous owners. The children’s father purchased the house for his wife without telling her before the children were born — it is enormous, wildly elaborate, stuffed with the ornate furniture and outsize presence of the VanHoebeeks. Though they are dead, they are looming spirits — the Conroys never even take down the VanHoebeek portraits. Here’s Danny, the novel’s narrator, on those paintings: “Mr. and Mrs. VanHoebeek, who had no first names that I had ever heard, were old in their portraits but not entirely ancient. … Even in their separate frames they were so together, so married, I always thought it must have been one large painting that someone cut in half.” It is in front of those paintings that the novel begins: “The first time our father brought Andrea to the Dutch House, Sandy, our housekeeper, came to my sister’s room and told us to come downstairs. ‘Your father has a friend he wants you to meet,’ she said.”