Ann Patchett has quickly become one of my favorite authors. Her prose is just that- poetry; her dialogue and her descriptions are so vivid, believable. Her work is both easy to read and also thoughtful and intelligent. I was recommended State of Wonder a few months ago, and promptly bought The Dutch House and Bel Canto immediately. I cannot recommend her enough.
The Dutch House was no disappointment. In fact, this book spoke to me in quite a special way, because it is about losing a house (technically, literally- it’s also about families, and love, and everything else in life.) In 2021, I lost my grandmother- who was in every intent and purpose, my ride or die in life- and had to go back home to Chicago several times to clean out my childhood home. My heart was- and a part of it still is- broken.
I grew up in Ukrainian Village just west of Downtown, and only when I moved away in my 20s did I realize how special and extraordinary the way I grew up was. My first words were not necessarily in English. I didn’t know what “pasta” was in English until I was in, like, 3rd grade. We had a neighborhood filled with Ukrainian immigrants who stubbornly clung to their language, beliefs, customs, and food. We shopped at Ukrainian markets, went to Ukrainian school on Saturday, and Ukrainian Byzantine church on Sunday. (Despite my atheism-lean, I will say the Byzantine church is beautiful and ornate, gold-filled and history-rich, laden with mystery, and smelling like incense, and I prefer and enjoy all of this to other forms of organized religion I have experienced.) My childhood wasn’t particularly magical or wonderful in any way, but I still feel tied to this house I grew up in, where I spent both my childhood years and also several years way-finding my way in my 20s. It was in our family for generations, 60 years, and was filled with Ukrainian things, and books and photos and piles of magical things that were fun to sift through when you were a kid. The selling of the house, and the cleaning of it, was a minor tragedy. We gathered as many treasured things as we could, and then sold it as it was, for there were too many things in there to remove in a short amount of time. So much history and time, just gone in a snap, in a sale.
Two years later, I still have extremely vivid and reoccurring dreams about the house. In them, I am in the house, looking for lost things, looking through boxes, for jewelry, books, paintings. I feel a part of me may actually be in the house when I’m dreaming this. Sometimes, I dream I have snuck in, and I can see the new owner coming up through the glass front door, and I have to hide. I clearly have a lot of regret over leaving the house, and whatever we left inside it.
The Dutch House, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, feels out this loss in vivid and profound ways, and explores what it means to live in a house, and grow up somewhere, and move away, and lose your family possessions, and experience the fracturing of a family. Oddly enough, one of the possessions so left in the house was a portrait of the sister, Maeve. (I, too, left paintings in the house, which I wish I could go back and get.) And in a totally believable and intimate tidbit of living in a house, Patchett describes a secret cache of quarters hidden underneath the lip of the dining room table. Our family, too, had a secret cash stash in just this place, and when cleaning out the house I swiped underneath the table to make sure, at least, that anything wasn’t left there. I almost cried when I read that part in her book. That’s the beauty of Patchett’s writing. How could she have known this? And yet, I’m sure, families have secret stashes underneath the lips of dining room tables all over the world.
One more thing about Patchett’s writing. Her dialogue is extraordinary, so fluid and real it’s hard to understand it is imaginary. (Is it? I would ask her this, in an author interview, if she would be so kind!!) Most everyone will relate to The Dutch House because most everyone, if you were lucky enough, grew up in homes as children and then moved away as adults. In the end (spoiler alert!), fortunate has it that the house comes back to the original family, in a way. I wonder if my own story has such a similar ending. Read this now.
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