Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2020
A tornado whisks Dorothy to Oz; Gulliver is tied down by Lilliputians. There are realms of fiction where fantasy, absurdity, and impossibilities delight and inform us. The Dutch House is not one of these. This earthbound book attempts to treat us to a tale of human relations but its fantasies amount simply to misinformation.
Let’s start with the plot: Cyril Conroy is a hard-working, unloving, but not uncaring man who wrote no will and put all his considerable assets in jointly with a second wife whom he doesn’t even really care for. This unlikely woman, Andrea Smith, is a wicked stepmother and when Cyril dies suddenly, she turns his two young children, Maeve and Danny, out in the cold.
Now wait a minute! Dependent children cannot be deprived of an inheritance especially if there is no will, or even if there is a will that specifically disinherits them. This is because of the Probate Court system. In every US state and most foreign countries, when a person dying intestate, a probate judge takes charge of the assets and hears claims made against the estate. Lawyer Gooch could, of course, be first in line. It’s simply not possible in real life or plausible in fiction for Andrea to take over her dead husband’s assets and banish the children. Settling the estate of a wealthy person takes months and often involves litigation that may go on for years as in Dickens’ Bleak House. Everybody knows this and I’m amazed that readers could ignore how the law functions despite the author’s clumsy justifications to score a plot twist. My willful suspension of disbelief took a jolt that never recovered.
As for the characters, they are cardboard cutouts. The three servants, Jocelyn, Sandy, and Fluffy, are lovely white people, happy in their work. No American Dirt here. The substantive characters are the two children, Maeve and Danny. Maeve is brilliant woman and has a responsible position in a frozen foods company -- frozen being the operative word. She doesn’t marry, has no love life, but directs Danny’s life as carefully as if she were conducting the BSO. She sends him to Choat School, to college, and the to the country’s most expensive medical school in part as a way of punishing Andrea by exhausting an education fund that father left for them and for Andreas’ two girls. (Kinda mean-spirited don’t ya think?) Danny doesn’t even want to be a doctor but since Maeve suffers from diabetes, it would be handy to have a medic in the house. And she directs his marriage to a girl he met casually on a train. She finds in Celeste a good Catholic girl, check; her family lives near Maeve, check; and Danny isn’t really in love with her, double check. You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to wonder about Maeve taking over her younger brother’s life.
As for Danny, can anyone think of a teen-age boy described with so little manliness? Where are his girlfriends (or boyfriends?). Who does he party with? What does he think about? I really thought that he was planning to drop the D and become Annie.
By the flash-forward at the end of Chapter 8, the book had lost me, and I speed-read the rest. At some point, mother reappears, this same mother who left Maeve and Danny as two small children without a goodbye, an apparent homeless psychotic, to become a junior Mother Teresa in India. Andrea dies, Maeve dies, and the rest live on happily. I’m really surprised that anyone stuck with this dreadful book to its stupid and unbelievable end.
Richard Pillard
• Pillard, Richard C
Reading Notes on The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
A tornado whisks Dorothy to Oz; Gulliver is tied down by Lilliputians. There are realms of fiction where fantasy, absurdity, and impossibilities delight and inform us. The Dutch House is not one of these. This earthbound book attempts to treat us to a tale of human relations but its fantasies amount simply to misinformation.
Let’s start with the plot: Cyril Conroy is a hard-working, unloving, but not uncaring man who wrote no will and put all his considerable assets in jointly with a second wife whom he doesn’t even really care for. This unlikely woman, Andrea Smith, is a wicked stepmother and when Cyril dies suddenly, she turns his two young children, Maeve and Danny, out in the cold.
Now wait a minute! Dependent children cannot be deprived of an inheritance especially if there is no will, or even if there is a will that specifically disinherits them. This is because of the Probate Court system. In every US state and most foreign countries, when a person dying intestate, a probate judge takes charge of the assets and hears claims made against the estate. Lawyer Gooch could, of course, be first in line. It’s simply not possible in real life or plausible in fiction for Andrea to take over her dead husband’s assets and banish the children. Settling the estate of a wealthy person takes months and often involves litigation that may go on for years as in Dickens’ Bleak House. Everybody knows this and I’m amazed that readers could ignore how the law functions despite the author’s clumsy justifications to score a plot twist. My willful suspension of disbelief took a jolt that never recovered.
As for the characters, they are cardboard cutouts. The three servants, Jocelyn, Sandy, and Fluffy, are lovely white people, happy in their work. No American Dirt here. The substantive characters are the two children, Maeve and Danny. Maeve is brilliant woman and has a responsible position in a frozen foods company -- frozen being the operative word. She doesn’t marry, has no love life, but directs Danny’s life as carefully as if she were conducting the BSO. She sends him to Choat School, to college, and the to the country’s most expensive medical school in part as a way of punishing Andrea by exhausting an education fund that father left for them and for Andreas’ two girls. (Kinda mean-spirited don’t ya think?) Danny doesn’t even want to be a doctor but since Maeve suffers from diabetes, it would be handy to have a medic in the house. And she directs his marriage to a girl he met casually on a train. She finds in Celeste a good Catholic girl, check; her family lives near Maeve, check; and Danny isn’t really in love with her, double check. You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to wonder about Maeve taking over her younger brother’s life.
As for Danny, can anyone think of a teen-age boy described with so little manliness? Where are his girlfriends (or boyfriends?). Who does he party with? What does he think about? I really thought that he was planning to drop the D and become Annie.
By the flash-forward at the end of Chapter 8, the book had lost me, and I speed-read the rest. At some point, mother reappears, this same mother who left Maeve and Danny as two small children without a goodbye, an apparent homeless psychotic, to become a junior Mother Teresa in India. Andrea dies, Maeve dies, and the rest live on happily. I’m really surprised that anyone stuck with this dreadful book to its stupid and unbelievable end.
A tornado whisks Dorothy to Oz; Gulliver is tied down by Lilliputians. There are realms of fiction where fantasy, absurdity, and impossibilities delight and inform us. The Dutch House is not one of these. This earthbound book attempts to treat us to a tale of human relations but its fantasies amount simply to misinformation.
Let’s start with the plot: Cyril Conroy is a hard-working, unloving, but not uncaring man who wrote no will and put all his considerable assets in jointly with a second wife whom he doesn’t even really care for. This unlikely woman, Andrea Smith, is a wicked stepmother and when Cyril dies suddenly, she turns his two young children, Maeve and Danny, out in the cold.
Now wait a minute! Dependent children cannot be deprived of an inheritance especially if there is no will, or even if there is a will that specifically disinherits them. This is because of the Probate Court system. In every US state and most foreign countries, when a person dying intestate, a probate judge takes charge of the assets and hears claims made against the estate. Lawyer Gooch could, of course, be first in line. It’s simply not possible in real life or plausible in fiction for Andrea to take over her dead husband’s assets and banish the children. Settling the estate of a wealthy person takes months and often involves litigation that may go on for years as in Dickens’ Bleak House. Everybody knows this and I’m amazed that readers could ignore how the law functions despite the author’s clumsy justifications to score a plot twist. My willful suspension of disbelief took a jolt that never recovered.
As for the characters, they are cardboard cutouts. The three servants, Jocelyn, Sandy, and Fluffy, are lovely white people, happy in their work. No American Dirt here. The substantive characters are the two children, Maeve and Danny. Maeve is brilliant woman and has a responsible position in a frozen foods company -- frozen being the operative word. She doesn’t marry, has no love life, but directs Danny’s life as carefully as if she were conducting the BSO. She sends him to Choat School, to college, and the to the country’s most expensive medical school in part as a way of punishing Andrea by exhausting an education fund that father left for them and for Andreas’ two girls. (Kinda mean-spirited don’t ya think?) Danny doesn’t even want to be a doctor but since Maeve suffers from diabetes, it would be handy to have a medic in the house. And she directs his marriage to a girl he met casually on a train. She finds in Celeste a good Catholic girl, check; her family lives near Maeve, check; and Danny isn’t really in love with her, double check. You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to wonder about Maeve taking over her younger brother’s life.
As for Danny, can anyone think of a teen-age boy described with so little manliness? Where are his girlfriends (or boyfriends?). Who does he party with? What does he think about? I really thought that he was planning to drop the D and become Annie.
By the flash-forward at the end of Chapter 8, the book had lost me, and I speed-read the rest. At some point, mother reappears, this same mother who left Maeve and Danny as two small children without a goodbye, an apparent homeless psychotic, to become a junior Mother Teresa in India. Andrea dies, Maeve dies, and the rest live on happily. I’m really surprised that anyone stuck with this dreadful book to its stupid and unbelievable end.
