A review by diameters
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

post-read thoughts

• not sure why i cried SO hard after finishing the book, but i did. this entire book should have been absolutely boring, about two rich kids getting kicked out of their house and then going on to live their privileged lives. i found the way patchett leaves the emotions sometimes unsaid very convincing. i don't know WHY i understood elna's departure, but i did. her hatred and disbelief of the house all felt true, the same way maeve's willingness to stay at her job despite once wanting so much more and the siblings' attachment to sitting in the driveway and norma's infinite guilt all felt true. there is so much bittersweet misery in this book, especially from the way you watch maeve grow up and never become what she might've, because thinking about a woman in context of her girlhood is always a little bit heartbreaking.
• by comparison, our main character danny is bland at best, because this book belongs to maeve and mr. conroy and, for a little bit, andrea. which is why i think that part i is much, much stronger than ii and particularly iii, which actually derailed so much at times that it would sometimes lose me. danny is so detached from celeste that their entire relationship, meant to come off as a "settling down" for both of them, instead portrays danny as a shallow, unsympathetic, unfeeling capital M-man at times.
• the other reason i struggled with the ending were the frustrating "twists" that took place over and over again, with hardly twenty pages in between. wrapping up by returning fluffy, INTRODUCING ELNA, and infantilizing andrea feels too heavy-handed for a novel who spent its first three hundred pages building up this little skyscraper of cards. elna should not have returned, nor andrea: this novel and its titular building are all about the insidious little bits of history that sometimes stay with you, and how people move on from them. having them tie up like that, and then fast-forwarding through their reunion (elna choosing to take care of andrea was cruel) to maeve's inexplicable death felt pace-wise, very off.
• another plot point i was more split on is the exact mirroring of the dutch house with danny buying the brownstone for celeste, and only finally realizing at their divorce that he'd never considered whether she'd like it or not. this parallel was rather shockingly on the nose, but the more i think about it, the less i hate it. the characterization of danny up to this point has been frustratingly sparse, which allows for him to do something just as callous—in fact, the EXACT SAME THING—that his father did to lose his mother. but danny never recognizes it as a parallel. it's heavily implied but i wish he'd just said it. if he'd just have a moment for himself, which he hasn't really this entire book. he's almost nick carroway-esque in the way we get to know him through his interactions with other people, and how detached he comes off at times. the latter half of the book reads as if an outside viewer has taken up residence in danny's head.
• the whole novel has quite a zoomed-out look on the life of danny and maeve, spanning from danny's fluffy story (four) to maeve's death (fifties). inevitably, the way things change makes me hurt a little bit. it is simply that kind of hollowness, but none of the scenes after their father's death seem to have the same kind of liveliness to them, though it's something you only notice maybe midway through part ii, even into the early sections of part iii. and perhaps that's what patchett intended, that perhaps the line between childhood and adulthood is clearest only in hindsight.
• i want to talk more about how this house, like the one in hill house, haunts its characters. it's far less insidious but it's got its roots buried deepin the relationship between danny and maeve, which is overwhelmingly the ONLY convincing one in this book. but i'm tired of typing up this review lol.
• i really didn't mean to write so much for this book, but it touches on so many of the themes that i obsess over. i don't think it's a particular masterpiece, but i bawled my eyes out after finishing, despite not having cried at any particular scene in the novel. right now, i don't think i can recall another time where that happened. i couldn't (and can't!) explain what hit me so hard, but in that moment it was so meaningful. it really was.

specific quotes/topics

• “mothers were the measure of safety, which meant that I was safer than maeve. after our mother left, maeve took up the job on my behalf but no one did the same for her.”

• "the idiocy of what we took and what we left cannot be overstated. we packed up clothes and shoes I would outgrow in six months, and left behind the blanket at the foot of my bed my mother had pieced together out of her dresses."

• “it sounded so nostalgic when he said it, the three of us, as if we had once been a unit instead of just a circumstance.”

• “there are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you'd been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you're suspended knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.” fuck me i want this line

• "they were disasters. they were mine."

• "I always imagined the house would die without us. I don't know, I thought it would crumple up. Do houses ever die of grief?"

• "our childhood was a fire. there had been four children in the house and only two of them had gotten out." ←— ****this one i have thoughts about. it's a beautiful line but. the scope of their tragedy is . not having a mother? having that house? something about loss something about scars something about danny being melodramatic

  • there are more but all of sudden i've forgotten them all. will put them down if i ever remember them, because i don't want to lose them.