The Dutch House

“Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?” I asked my sister. We were sitting in her car, parked in front of the Dutch House, in the broad daylight of early summer.”

By Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett’s The Dutch house recently celebrated the notoriety of having sold a million copies. Wow. So I find myself reluctant to admit that I finished the autographed hardcover copy I had reverently purchased and, as I do with most of Ann’s books, went ‘Huh. I wonder what all the fuss is about.” Then, as I always do, I thought about it for days and weeks after. I am in fact still thinking about it.

I suspect the beauty of Ann’s stories is in the way her simple portraits of life invoke a unique response in each reader. It always takes me awhile to see beyond the surface simplicity into the universal complex human experiences playing out. The quote above, also on the book’s dust jacket made me anticipate a story about memory. About the vagaries of memory and its reliance on subjective reflection. But that wasn’t what struck me about her story.

The Dutch House provoked me to think about the infinitely moving parts which make up any family and what happens as those parts shift and change, enter and exit the scene. And what members of that system choose as their stable object. The seemingly eternal piece which all of the members so desperately fight to keep in place. And finally, what secrets and truths the object of stability hold which make it, perhaps, the least stable piece in an ever shifting landscape.

In The Dutch House, the protagonist’s mother left the scene in a way mysterious only to him as a young child. Her choice shifted the dynamic of her family, uprooting their stability even as they continued to live in the home which shaped their history, their sense of self, and where they would connect later in life. I think about that a great deal since Roy died. How has his leaving shaped the stability of our family, our sense of identity, and connections we make? How do the shifting dynamics of life, which I believe we so fiercely fight to avoid, reshape who we are and determine who we become? How does it define what we fear and what we cling to? And does that shifting, after all, change the course of our lives or simply propel us more deeply into the course laid out for us?

So, I suppose, that’s what all the fuss is about. I am guessing that if or when you read the book you will have your own personal connection to the story which is very different than mine. That’s why Ann Patchett sells millions of books.