But it is really Maeve who takes up the job of mothering him it is to her he goes when, as a child, he has bad dreams, and it is she who, throughout the book, remains his closest confidant and friend, even after his marriage to Celeste. In her absence, he is lovingly cared for by family servants, first Fiona (known as ‘Fluffy’), then, when Fluffy is dismissed for hitting him with a spoon (about which we learn more later), by sisters Sandy and Jocelyn. Only later in the book does he record how this mystery is finally solved.ĭanny does not remember his mother. His mother, too, is there until he is three years old, her disappearance a mystery to him and his sister. Danny lives there with his sister, Maeve, who is seven years older than him, and his father, a property developer who, as Danny comments, ‘was always more comfortable with his tenants than he was with the people in his office or the people in his house’. The Dutch House was the place where those Dutch people with the unpronounceable name lived.īy the time that Danny Conroy, the narrator of this story, comes to live in this grand house with its huge glass window, decorative wrought-iron work and third-floor ballroom, the VanHoebeeks are long dead and the house and its contents sold to Danny’s father to pay off their debts. The Dutch House, as it came to be known in Elkins Park and Jenkintown and Glenside and all the way to Philadelphia, referred not to the house’s architecture but to its inhabitants. Step inside: the new novel from author of Bel Canto unravels a family mystery spun around a grand house. Tags: Ann Patchett/ Bel Canto/ The Dutch House/ US fiction
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