‘Your father has a friend he wants you to meet,’ she said.” … 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. VanHoebeek, who had no first names that I had ever heard, were old in their portraits but not entirely ancient. Here’s Danny, the novel’s narrator, on those paintings: “Mr. Though they are dead, they are looming spirits - the Conroys never even take down the VanHoebeek portraits. 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.

“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. I make the Hansel and Gretel reference deliberately. And you won’t end up shoved into an oven. But if you allow yourself to walk along with Patchett, you’ll find riches at the end of the trail. 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. 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. 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.Īnn Patchett doesn’t want to make you sweat.

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. blurb is complete without the descriptors “searing,” “probing,” “challenging” or the like.

It takes guts to write a fairy tale these days.

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