54 pages • 1 hour read
Ann PatchettThe Dutch House
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1
Chapter 1 Summary
The Dutch House was built by the VanHoebeeks, a family that made its money in cigarettes. By 1946, the entire VanHoebeek family was dead. Cyril bought the house fully furnished in 1946 and brought his wife Elna and daughter Maeve to live in the house. Danny came along five years later. Elna and Cyril’s marriage dissolved sometime after. Eventually, Cyril met and married Andrea.
Danny recalls the day he and Maeve meet Andrea for the first time. Andrea is blonde, much younger than their father, and more interested in the house than the people in it; Andrea’s distaste for the children is apparent even on this first visit, which is cut short by Cyril when the tension between his children and girlfriend makes him uncomfortable.
Danny also recalls the first time after their expulsion that he and Maeve parked outside of the house to spy on Andrea, Norma, and Bright. Danny was 15 and on break from Choate, a pricey boarding school in Connecticut. Although Patchett doesn’t provide details on why the two are stuck on the outside looking in, the Conroy children are unable to enter their childhood home, and there is some bitterness in the way they watch Andrea and her daughters.
Chapter 2 Summary
The chapter shifts back in time to the immediate aftermath of that first visit with Andrea. Andrea manages to insinuate herself into the life of the Conroys “like a virus” (16). She shows up frequently whether Cyril is there or not; it is clear to the children that she is obsessed with the house. Her relationship with them remains as icy and formal as it was the first time they met her. Cyril seems unfazed by Andrea’s persistence. His only concern is work. The little time Cyril spends with Danny is on Saturdays, when Cyril takes the boy out to collect rent from the tenants in the many buildings Cyril owns. These outings are supposed to teach Danny the value of hard work, a lesson Cyril thinks Danny must learn because Danny will not grow up poor like Cyril did. The deference of the tenants makes Danny uncomfortable.
Beyond these Saturdays, Cyril is a distant figure. The daily care of the children comes from Sandy and Jocelyn, two sisters who do all the housework and cooking; for a little while, Danny’s nanny Fluffy (Fiona) was there as well before being fired for hitting Danny with a spoon and having an affair with Cyril. Patchett reveals that Cyril is an eligible bachelor when Andrea meets him because his first wife, Elna, left him and the children to do charity work in India several years before. Maeve slipped into a diabetic coma in the immediate aftermath of this abandonment. In family lore and Danny’s mind, the two events are linked, so no one ever talks about Elna for fear that the trauma will kill Maeve.
Chapter 3 Summary
Andrea introduces her daughters to Cyril’s children two years after she appears in the Conroys’ lives. The Conroy children assume their father will break up with Andrea because she is a mother. Far from abandoning Andrea, Cyril welcomes the two girls, even insisting on Maeve babysitting the girls when Andrea shows up with them one night before going out with Cyril. This imposition angers Maeve, but Cyril’s response to this anger—wondering if Maeve would mind watching them if they were her family—convinces Maeve that Cyril intends to marry Andrea. Maeve warns Danny about this possibility.
Chapter 4 Summary
Maeve’s intuition turns out to be correct when Cyril does marry Andrea. Maeve is by then a freshman at Barnard College. Looking back on the wedding and their incredulity that Cyril would marry Andrea, Danny realizes that he failed to recognize his father’s desire for Andrea, who was 31 and very pretty. In their 1971 visit to spy on the Dutch House, Danny asks his sister, “Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?” (45). Danny is wondering if Andrea was as terrible at first as he remembers. By 1971, the Conroy children have moved on in some ways, despite their repeated visits to lurk around the Dutch House. Maeve is a bookkeeper at a frozen vegetable packaging company, while Danny is in medical school at Columbia University.
The narrative then shifts back to the early years of Andrea and Cyril’s marriage. After the marriage, Andrea begins changing things in the house. She puts an end to the free hand Sandy and Jocelyn have in running the house. She moves Maeve to an attic room so that her own daughter, Norma, can have Maeve’s room, and Cyril says nothing in protest.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
Patchett uses these early chapters to establish the setting—the Dutch House from which the novel takes its title—and to highlight the significance of this setting to the plot and characters. Patchett is also telling a story that should be quite familiar to readers of Grimm’s tales and Western fairy tales—an evil stepmother entices the father and then supplants the father’s children. Patchett’s innovation in this part of the novel is to modernize the setting and to imagine what happens if those children are never restored to their rightful places.
The Dutch House, as the reactions of Elna and the descriptions of its interiors show, is a large, overwhelming house built with what is essentially blood money—cigarettes sold to soldiers. Although Patchett avoids making specific mention of any curse upon the house as a result of the VanHoebeeks’ cigarette profits, the death of the father, mother, and all the children make it clear that the house has an unwholesome influence on its inhabitants. The unwholesome nature of the house extends to the Conroy family with Cyril’s purchase of the house. The curse continues its work when Elna can’t adjust to the rich setting and eventually leaves her children and husband for the more spartan setting of India. The house’s final work is to draw in Andrea, who systematically banishes the Conroy children and takes the house after the death of Cyril.
The reader does well to remember that the mysterious power of the house to kill people and break up families is a function of storytelling. Danny, the narrator of this story, is not a particularly self-aware individual (he at one point admits that he was “asleep to the world” (51)) and is quite young during some crucial events in the novel. While one could see some evil magic at work in the influence of the house on its inhabitants, Patchett takes pains to point to the very prosaic nature of what destroys the Conroys—their naivete in thinking that wealth would bring happiness and its loss meant automatic tragedy. The first four chapters of the novel allow her to develop the characters to the point that the reader can understand the devastating nature of the decision Andrea makes, and what the Conroys make of their lives in the aftermath.
Related Titles
By Ann Patchett
