The Dutch House is a novel by Ann Patchett, published in 2019. It tells the story of two siblings, Danny and Maeve Conroy, and how their abandonment as children leaves them reliant on each other.
The fictional Dutch House of the title is located in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, where the author spent weekends as a college student. She felt that writing about an area she had actually spent time in and felt affection for would give the novel a layer of familiarity and authenticity. This paid off: Kirkus Reviews raved over the book in large part because the setting was so alive that it gave the reader the feeling that they could jump into the car, drive to Elkins Park, and find both Maeve and Danny once they got there. Indeed, reviews as a whole were laudatory, or at least positive.
The novel has elements of traditional fairy tales, such as a wicked stepmother, stepsisters, a magnificent “castle,” loss, and poverty, Patchett explained that she wanted to write a novel about the kind of stepmother she did not want to be (she became a stepmother when she married her husband). She also states frequently that the novel is a response, to an extent, to the Trump election in 2016: “This book was born out of the Trump election in a lot of ways. People keep saying to me, ‘You don’t write political books,’ and I think, wow, I feel like I do. But [there’s] this feeling of there would be nothing in the world better than to be superrich, to be a Kardashian, to be a Trump. And probably to a certain extent, that’s always been true, but it feels so true now. And so I really wanted to write a book about somebody who doesn’t want to be rich. And somebody who has money and loses it, and somebody who has money and walks away from it.”
Patchett has also told interviewers that she did a great deal of research for the novel and relied on many preview readers’ suggestions: “for The Dutch House I did a ton of research. Mainly about real estate in New York in the late ’60s and through to the 1970s. I researched a lot about buildings — I have a neighbor down the street who’s an architect, and I can’t even remember how many times I would call him up and say, ‘Can I come over for a minute?’ He had a great book, which I loved so much that I was always talking about it and a friend of mine tracked it down and bought a copy for me. It’s a book of home architecture and it explains: this is the neoclassical home, this is the colonial home, this is the renaissance, this what these columns are called, and this is what these windows are called. My neighbor’s name is Cyril [like Danny and Maeve’s father], and I was always going to Cyril’s and saying, ‘Okay, now Danny has a job working on a construction site in the summer, what would he be doing, what’s really hard?’ And he said putting up drywall is really hard, much harder than you think it’s supposed to be. I was doing an interview yesterday and the guy said, ‘I was so glad that you said that putting up drywall is really hard, because it is really hard.’ And I wanted to say, ‘I have no idea.’”
