How? It begins in the late 1940s, when Cyril Conroy surprises his wife, Elna, with a glass mansion in the posh Philadelphia neighborhood of Elkins Park. Andrea is marked out as morally deficient during her very first visit to the Dutch House, when she singles out the portraits of the Van Hoebeeks to Cyril for praise: “‘It must be a comfort, having them with you,’ Andrea said to him, not of his children but of his paintings.’” Like a Jamesian villain, she prefers art to life. Their expulsion from paradise becomes quite literal a few years later; in classic fairy tale fashion, Cyril is putty in his second wife's hands. Andrea, a pretty young widow 18 years Cyril's junior, falls in love with his house and then finagles her way into it with her two small daughters. James said that the house of fiction has “not one window, but a million”, depending on who is looking at the scene, and Patchett’s elegantly constructed narrative often reads like a dramatisation of this idea. Home is the eponymous Dutch House, a 1922 mansion outside Philadelphia that their father, Cyril, a real estate mogul, bought fully furnished in an estate sale as a surprise for his wife in 1946, when Maeve was 5. The windows both took in the sun and reflected it back against the wide lawn.”. Ann Patchett's 'The Dutch House,' Reviewed Patchett's new novel is a story of paradise lost, dusted with fairy tale. We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father." The sun-drenched Dutch House – so named not for its architecture but for the nationality of its original owners, the Van Hoebeeks – is in every sense a hot property. Patchett's concern here, as in much of her fiction, is with the often unconventional families we cobble together with what's available to us. Like all enchantresses, the demure but deadly Andrea has “a knack for making the impossible seem natural”, including marriage to Cyril. It’s a rare Patchett novel that ends without the slightest glimmer of redemption, and here the major players virtually all – as in a story by James – arrive at final positions that involve an ironic inversion of where they started. The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett (Harper).This warm intergenerational saga transplants fairy-tale tropes into a mid-century mid-Atlantic setting. For years after they are banished from the Dutch House, Maeve and Danny make a ritual of parking outside their former home to watch the comings and goings of Andrea and their stepsisters through its vast windows. Crammed with silk chairs, tapestry ottomans, Chinese lamps and oil paintings, it is, as one of the characters observes, “a piece of art” and, like a piece of art, it ignites extreme reactions in the people who come into contact with it. The house in Ann Patchett’s eighth novel is the last word in desirable real estate. In spite of her frailty, she is a truly monstrous creation, dispensing charity with the ruthless impartiality of a saint, offering her love and presence to all except her own family. The Dutch House is the stuff of fairy tales, and Patchett’s plot sounds like a fairy tale, as well. "We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we're not seeing it as the people we were, we're seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.". And if Maeve is a substitute mother then she’s in some ways as compromised a figure as Elna and Andrea, demanding her own relentless form of sacrifice in the guise of Danny’s medical studies. I kissed John Updike as he presented me with an award’. Being Patchett, she brings her novel around to themes of gratitude, compassion and forgiveness. When Elna goes, the Conroys are thrown into a crisis of archetypal proportions: “They had all become characters in the worst part of a fairytale.” The children are left to the ministrations of the cook and housekeeper, a pair of warm-hearted sisters (though Danny, like a fairytale prince, doesn’t realise for a long time that his two watchful guardians have their own backstory).

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