I make the Hansel and Gretel reference deliberately. And you won’t end up shoved into an oven. But if you allow yourself to walk along with Patchett, you’ll find riches at the end of the trail. And isn’t that what fairy tales are made of? This novel takes a winding road through the forest and doesn’t rush to a finish, nor is the ending wholly surprising. As she explained in a 2016 profile in The Guardian, “I’ve been writing the same book my whole life - that you’re in one family, and all of a sudden, you’re in another family and it’s not your choice and you can’t get out.” In “The Dutch House,” the family is built both by blood and by love. At a moment when everything in the world feels on the verge of falling apart, there seems to be a widespread cultural expectation (in the West, anyway) that serious art - the kind worthy of respect, in books, television, film or theater - is gonna make you sweat, that it should make you sweat.Īnn Patchett doesn’t want to make you sweat. The use of destabilizing narrative techniques (which often force critics to either include spoilers or to be oblique in order to avoid them) is so prevalent as to seem almost de rigueur.
blurb is complete without the descriptors “searing,” “probing,” “challenging” or the like. Patchett hopscotches across time and points of view, creating a patchwork chronicle of the children’s upbringing-focusing especially on the summers that all six spend together in southern Virginia-and tracking them into adulthood.It takes guts to write a fairy tale these days. He takes her and her two kids to Virginia and leaves his ex-wife and his own four children behind. It begins in Los Angeles in 1964 when deputy district attorney Bert Cousins steals away beat cop Fix Keating’s wife.
But she ups the degree of difficulty with a teeming cast of characters: The story follows the crossed fortunes of four parents and six step-siblings across 50 years. Her new novel, “Commonwealth” (Harper, 322 pages, $27.99), is more provincial (it rarely ventures outside the U.S.) and more autobiographical (the family it describes is loosely modeled on Ms.
In “State of Wonder” (2011), she sent a pack of pharmacologists deep into the Amazon rainforest in search of a miraculous fertility drug. In “Bel Canto” (2001), her breakthrough novel, South American revolutionaries seize a ballroom where a famous opera soprano is performing and find themselves captives to the imperious diva’s commands. Ann Patchett has always had an adventurous streak.
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