I didn't know anything about
The Dutch House when I decided to read it. A friend gave me her copy after she finished it several months ago. I was leaving for a weeklong trip to New Mexico and Colorado and looked at my shelves for something that I thought would make for good travel reading and somehow settled on this. I've read two other books by Ann Patchett:
State of Wonder, which I enjoyed, and
Truth and Beauty, which I didn't. I finished it yesterday afternoon, but I'm not entirely sure how I feel about
The Dutch House. On one level, it satisfied what I was looking for: it was the kind of book I could read on the plane and on the back porch of our house in Angel Fire, New Mexico. I was about halfway through it when I got home on Monday and I read the second half before work, at lunch, after work, and after dinner yesterday. It captured my attention. But I also felt it was missing something. It seemed to hover on the brink of profundity but never quite get there.
The book centers on a brother and sister whose mother abandons them as children. Their father remarries and their step-mother wants to be rid of them. Eventually she succeeds. They go from being rich to getting by. And then the son manages to get rich again. There's more to it than that, of course, but I honestly couldn't believe this book was asking me to feel sympathy for a young man (the brother, who is the narrator) who despite a troubled home life for a few years of his adolescence, goes on to make a killing in New York real estate while he's completing med school. Or perhaps I wasn't meant to feel too much sympathy for him; perhaps the book is about something else.
