The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

For almost all of my reading life, I have tended to prejudge pop novels and pop novelists. Certainly, that prejudice has saved me from reading many bad or so-so novels, but it has also led me to miss some real gems. Today,  I am going to say a few words about two 2019 novels. Although I don’t intend to reveal much of the storylines, I want at least to recommend these books. The first has been on the best seller lists for quite a long time. It is a novel about a house, The Dutch House, and the family who lived there in a period spanning five decades. I have shortchanged Patchett before; it took me several years to get around to reading (and reviewing) her fine novel, Bel Canto and almost as long to read The Magician’s Assistant.

A man who has been poor all of his life suddenly comes into a lot of money, and one of the first things he does is buy a house he thinks to be the grandest he has ever seen. He buys if for his beloved wife, but she is uncomfortable in the house from the beginning and comes soon to hate it. Time and time again, she leaves the house and her two children Danny and Maeve, and  stays away for greater and greater lengths until finally she leaves for good. The two children are inseparable, only comfortable in the world when they are together. Maeve attempts to be the lost parent for her younger brother, after they are forced out of the home when their father dies and leaves his entire estate to his second wife. The characters of the two children are very well fleshed out by Patchett, although their father, Cyril Conroy, is more a shadow than a fully developed character. The one provision Cyril had included in his will for his son Danny was a fund to pay for his education including any graduate program he enters. Clever Maeve devises a plan to keep her brother in school for many years, until he receives a medical degree, thus keeping a least some of their father’s money from the merciless stepmother.  

I did not find this novel to be particularly important as a socio-political statement, but since the time span includes the Viet Nam war and the political turmoil in this country right up to the present, Patchett does provide some insights into the separation of rich and poor and a running commentary on political events. Still, the most important relationship described is that between sister and brother. The scenes between them are touching and very believable and explore what I would call a kind of emotional incest.

The second book, Alice Hoffman’s The World That We Knew, is a wonderfully researched book about World War II and the Holocaust. I have been somewhat put off by Hoffman’s inclusion of magic in her early hugely popular novels like Practical Magic and The Rules of Magic, and magic enters this novel as well, but in a way I found much less intrusive. 

In the world that we knew, Hanni Kohn saw what was before her. She would do whatever she must to save those she loved, whether it was right or wrong, permitted or forbidden. 

Hanni’s doctor husband has already been murdered in a riot outside his Jewish hospital when the reader is introduced to the surviving members of the family. Hanni knows she must do something to protect her beautiful 12 year old daughter from the Nazi regime, but how can she protect her? While Hanni is able to prevent a sexual assault on her daughter by a Nazi soldier, she does so only by killing the assailant, and knows that the consequences will be dire.  In a desperate move, Hanni takes her daughter, Lea, to a renowned rabbi pleading with him to help hide her daughter and to get her out of Germany. It is the rabbi’s daughter, Ettie, who steps in to save Lea, and she does so by creating a golem. “A golem…may look human, but it has no soul. It is pure and elemental and it has a single goal, to protect. Ettie explains that the incantations must be exactly right, and that if she makes a mistake, it will mean instant death to her. She finally agrees to create the golem in spite of the great risk, but only if Lea buys identification papers and a train ticket for Ettie’s little sister, so that she, too, can escape from Berlin.

The rest of the novel describes the journey of Lea and Ava (the golem) as they escape to France and then through a long series of events that will get them to a place where they can join the French resistance and fight the Nazi occupation.

It is very clear that this book was a labor of love for Alice Hoffman, and in my estimation the most serious of her many successful novels. The bibliography at the back of the book evidences just how through Hoffman’s research was in creating this novel. 

Lea and Ettie’s life paths are entwined from the moment Ettie creates Ava and begins the long journey towards the south of France. There are so many wonderful and believable characters created by Hoffman as Lea and Ava continue their escape and find ways to enter into the fray, and to help oher Jews to escape Nazi rule.

So two hugely popular novels that deserve to be read.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

I want to talk to you this morning about a much talked about novel by Ann Patchett entitled Bel Canto. I can’t remember a time in the recent past when so many of my reader friends have recommended a book to me as a must read. Some loved it because they are music lovers, some because they saw it as a beautiful love story, and some recommended it because they saw it as politically significant. I actually read it some weeks ago, but felt that I must let it steep for awhile before I talked about it.

Let me say immediately that I understand why my music loving friends loved this book. For those who already love opera, this book reinforced that love; others vowed to take another and closer look at opera after reading it, supposing that they must really have missed something in not paying closer attention to this music form. And still others simply appreciated the weaving of music into social and political themes.

And the love stories are touching, oddly convincing, and very sweet. But how can a novel about the taking of hostages be also a love story and a tribute to music? In fact, isn’t there something odd about mixing a love of music with such troubling political themes? I have to admit that I am uncomfortable about the juxtaposition of such serious political questions with love and music appreciation, and even after waiting for a few weeks, I still feel a little tricked by this book, feel that the plot is too contrived and the circumstances just too hard to believe (despite the beautiful writing). One could take as the controlling theme of the entire novel the following line:

The world was a dangerous place, notions of personal safety were a fairy story told to children at bedtime. All anyone had to do was turn the wrong corner and everything would be gone.

Indeed, and I think the novel succeeds well in making this point. In some sense any of us could have been at a concert, social-political function, benefit, and one way or another our existences pass from ordinary people to hostages. The life we all take for granted is suddenly very much not granted, not guaranteed, not even likely. Dostoevsky with three minutes to live in the execution yard, about to die as a political prisoner, Victor Frankl in a concentration camp. The miracle of waking up again, alive.

But Patchett wants to do more. She wants to put a human face on the captors; she wants to try to explain in some way that members of powerful and affluent countries like ours might hear or see, that even the question of what ‘terrorism’ means is a loaded, complex, difficult. For the most part, so-called ‘terrorists’ use the weapons and tactics they can muster. It seems the word really connotes little more than disapproval, a kind of pejorative finger-pointing. If I do it, it’s war or defense; if you do it, it’s terrorism. Is dropping two thousand pound bombs terrorist? My friends tell me just the shock-wave from the explosion kills everything within quite an incredible radius. Oh, but we do it, so it’s not terrorist. Surgical strikes that (whether it is hit or miss, a mistake or not) wipe out neighborhoods, not terror because the weapons of terror are ours, the acts have been sanctified by Bush and Co. We kill hundreds, thousands, but these are acts of war, not of terrorism. If you attack me with a jet plane, that’s warfare. If you kill yourself in the detonation of your weapon, it’s terrorism. Actually, if you’re on the ‘wrong’ side, the less powerful side, your war will be called terrorism. Or so it seems.

Patchett sees all of this. She sets us up as the concert goers, suddenly taken and helpless before a band of armed men. The wrinkle is that we come to know the men, and women as it turns out, who are our captors. Not just know them, but depend on them, fall in love with them; the captives finding (for many different existential reasons) themselves while existing in this limbo state, even to the point of deceiving themselves into believing that it can continue. Most of their captors are children, truly armed and dangerous, but also deeply ‘innocent’. And even the generals are jaded but good men, eager to help the even more powerless in the cities and villages they have come from.

Ironically, the intent of the attack, the seizing of the President of this South American country and holding him for political ransom, is thwarted from go; the president is at home watching his favorite soap opera. Now the so-called guerrillas have a bevy of hostages, but nothing to do with them. From the first moments, the captors’ fates are sealed, it is only the fate of the hostages that is in question. Days, weeks, even months of negotiations:

Both parties were intractable and what the party inside this wall didn’t understand was that the government was always intractable, no matter what the country, what the circumstances. The government did not give in, and when they said they were giving in they were lying, every time, you could count on it.

This put into the mouth of the Swiss Red Cross mediator who struggles from the beginning to bring about some sort of negotiated end.

The messages are important and true, and yet I find myself bothered by the book. Certainly, it would not have happened. For example, there is a young Japanese man among the captives who is a gifted linguist; he can interpret for this band of diplomats and businessmen and musicians and captors, going from French to German to Russian to Spanish to Japanese. Still, if not believable, it is a clever device. The translator’s relative importance in the community of captives soars, while the man he works for, one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, relies on the translator as much, more, than any of the others who hub through him. His wealth matters little, though the cooking prowess of one of the minor French diplomats ‘on board’ becomes pivotal, as well as the general housemaid, housekeeping contributions of the Vice President whose house happens to hold the hostages. We readers get to watch this odd band become a community, seeing what really counts in day to day living, and Patchett provides lots of insights along the way. All the little things perceptive novelists see, Patchett sees: what makes relationships good ones, how even old relationships can be ‘redeemed’, how the glow of sexual love can literally current through our lives, from out of the blue. How it transforms and metamorphoses.

The novel has to be contrived in order to work, and the messages seem to justify the contrivance. Still, there is something too neat about this novel. Maybe simply my jade showing through, my cynicism.

But enough of my petty reservations, let me close by reading a long and lovely passage voicing a young woman’s view of the crisis, a woman who happens to be one of the captors, one of the ‘terrorists’, and also happens to love the Japanese translator, Gen, who very much loves her. Her name is Carmen, whom we now know is as gifted at learning languages as her teacher and lover. Carmen is also a kind of personal captor to the famous opera singer, Roxanne Cross, who is a gigantic presence in the book though I have said little about her here. But to the scene:

Gen lived one life and in that life he was always a prisoner and his friends were the other prisoners, and even though he loved Carmen and got along politely with some of the terrorists, he never got confused and thought he wanted to join LFDMS. But for Carmen it was different. She had clearly two lives. She did her push-ups in the morning and stood for inspection. She carried her rifle on guard. She kept a boning knife in her boot and she knew how to use it. She obeyed orders. She was, as it had been explained to her, part of the forces that would bring about change. But she was also the girl who went to the china closet at night, who was learning to read in Spanish and could already say several things in English. Some mornings, Roxanne Cross let her climb into the impossibly soft sheets on her big bed, let her close her eyes for a few minutes and pretend she belonged there. She would pretend she was one of the prisoners, that she lived in a world with so many privileges that there was nothing to fight for. But no matter how the two sides got along, they were always two sides, and when she went form one to the other it was a matter of crossing over something.

Two sides, powerful and powerless, haves and have-nots. This is a good novel, and perhaps my friends are right, it is a great one.