Summary: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

When reviewing for the first time the play, “Waiting for Godot”, the theatre critic Vivian Mercier, writing in the Irish Times, famously described it as a play in which ‘nothing happens, twice’.

I had a similar thought when reading Ann Patchett’s “The Dutch House.” Nothing happens a lot in it.

Its narrator, Danny Conroy, describes his generally unremarkable life in an account that hops back and forth in time, much like an unreliable memory. Son of a wealthy property developer father in Philadelphia, Danny is really brought up by his older sister Maeve. She takes on maternal responsibilities after their mother’s departure from the family home – the Dutch House of the title. Maeve’s burdens are added to when their father acquiesces to marry Andrea. While the two step-sisters this brings them may not be ugly, Andrea certainly carries a measure of evil with her.

Danny, aware enough to know that he is self-absorbed, gets to go to medical school through Maeve’s efforts and wiles. But he never really practices as a doctor opting instead to become a property developer like his father. Maeve becomes the finance manager of a food company. Danny marries and has a family. Unfortunately, Maeve and his wife, Celeste, do not really get on. 

Around them America is changing, with the Vietnam war, and the demands for civil rights. But these barely encroach upon Danny’s consciousness. Maeve is, we learn in passing, socially engaged.But Danny is never really interested enough in what she is doing to tell the reader more.

So, that’s about it. 

But I don’t want to sell this short. “The Dutch House” is, perhaps, the literary equivalent of a still life of a fruit bowl: an exquisitely crafted rendering of ordinary life, or rather of life of unfulfilled potential. Selfless, wise-cracking Maeve, one feels throughout the book, should be the heroine of golden era Hollywood, a sort of Rosalind Russell figure from “His Girl Friday”, working on front page exposes of graft and corruption instead of being stuck, happily she claims, with balance sheets. By the end of the book one feels that her niece and namesake Mae is on the verge of the sort of life that Maeve should have lived.

“The Dutch House” is shot through with this sort of melancholia, and moments of unambiguous grief. It is a beautifully written and haunting book.