This was a selection for one of my book clubs – even though this isn’t the kind of novel I tend to gravitate towards, I was the one that added “something by Anne Patchett” to our list of potential book club reads because she owns a local book store. Another person then mentioned this one as being on her TBR, so the decision was made. I have heard that the audiobook is worth a listen because Tom Hanks narrates it. I enjoy audiobooks but often don’t have the patience so that wasn’t a big enough selling point for me.
Overall, the book was uneven for me. It started off strong and then once it was about a third of the way through and hit the driving incident we had been building towards, it lost some steam. I thought some of developments in the end were interesting thematically while also wishing Patchett had taken things in a completely direction. I wanted the main characters to come to closure with their past and move beyond on their own instead of how we actually arrive there.
The novel is the story of siblings, Maeve and Danny. Abandoned by their mother when they were 10 and 3 respectively, their father is distant in the way of a stereotypical 1950s dad, and it leads to an incredibly tight bond between the siblings. In fact, they don’t seem to really have close friends outside each other. Narrated by Danny, the novel begins the evening the two siblings (8 and 15 at the time) meet Andrea, the woman that will become their stepmother. While there is a main narrative that tells their story in chronological order, Danny intersperses the story with timeline jumps where he reflects on conversations he and Maeve had at later points in time about those moments or that are somehow relevant. As a result, we know early on that their relationship with Andrea sours catastrophically and has a huge impact on their life but we don’t know the details till we hit that one third mark. In fact, Andrea ended up being this comically/stereotypically evil stepmother and I really would have appreciated a bit more nuance (like to the point where she is apparently horrible to her own children as well).
In the midst of it all is the house – the Dutch House, named so for its original owners. To Danny’s dad, it was sign of his success while to their birth mother it was a monstrosity of privilege that drove her to flee to India and never contact them again. As someone says early on, their dad overcorrected for Elna, his first wife, by choosing his second wife based on how much she liked the house. Due to their mother’s departure, Maeve takes up a bit of maternal role to Danny, and as he gets older, he realizes that he and Maeve have very different views of this woman he doesn’t remember. The household staff remain constants in their life, and as he gets older, he is amazed by their descriptions of Elna as a saint figure especially compared to what he views as her defining action – abandonment (I almost started laughing when it was revealed she went to India to work with Mother Teresa given how much her legacy and reputation have been questioned and revisited in recent years – of course this well meaning white woman left her kids to do questionable charity and be a white savior).
The siblings are dysfunctional and during the second third of the novel, I was definitely wondering if I liked any of the characters because it seemed like Maeve and Danny had shaped their lives around being a thorn in Andrea’s side. And then I started changing my views again, feeling bit more sympathy for Maeve as she maybe does enjoy her life more than we realize based solely from Danny’s perspective. There are definitely points where Danny shows compete obliviousness to the people around him, failing to learn lessons from what everyone else would have interpreted as a cautionary tale about his father. Danny both kind of goes along with what the women in his life want and completely disregards their wants to follow his passion and his father’s footsteps.
Basically, it’s a novel about messy people and their relationships. How much you enjoy it will depend on how much you like reading about family dysfunction. I didn’t like it enough to feel the need to read anymore Patchett after this one.