The Dutch House was published by HarperCollins in 2019 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel was also adapted as an audiobook narrated by Tom Hanks, which became a bestseller in its own right.
The Dutch House is a grand, ostentatious mansion in Elkins Park, outside Philadelphia, built in 1922 by the VanHoebeek family and purchased in the 1940s by Cyril Conroy, a self-made real estate developer, as a surprise for his wife. But the house is too much — too grand, too laden with other people’s history, too far from the modest Catholic origins that defined Cyril and his wife. Cyril’s wife eventually leaves, abandoning her children Danny and Maeve to the house’s cold grandeur. Cyril remarries — Andrea, a younger woman who wants the house and everything in it — and when Cyril dies, Andrea expels Danny and Maeve.
The expulsion is the novel’s founding trauma, and Danny and Maeve spend the next fifty years processing it. They drive past the Dutch House regularly, parking outside to stare at it, telling and retelling the story of their dispossession. The house becomes an object of obsessive return: they cannot let it go, and the inability to let it go prevents them from fully inhabiting their actual lives. Danny narrates from late middle age, looking back, and his account has the quality of a fairy tale — the wicked stepmother, the enchanted house, the lost inheritance — though Patchett complicates the fairy-tale structure by showing that the “villains” (Andrea, Cyril) are more complex than Danny’s narrative allows.
The novel is ultimately about the stories families tell themselves: how a narrative of victimhood can become a prison as confining as the house it mourns, and how letting go of the story is harder than letting go of the property.
Collecting The Dutch House
First edition (HarperCollins, New York, 2019): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good: $10–$25
- Signed: $40–$100