The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Memory is a slippery thing. I've pondered the complex mystery of familial memories for many years and now Ann Patchett brilliantly addresses it and other themes centered around family, abandonment, and forgiveness in her latest novel "The Dutch House." She also builds an entire world around a young couple, seemingly deeply in love, who actually don't know each other at all. 

While Cyril and Elna are struggling, they are ostensibly happy. But when Cyril, through nose-to-the-grindstone work and good timing, establishes himself as a well-heeled real estate developer post World War II, a fissure opens up between him and his wife. By the time he surprises Elna with the keys to the elegant

Dutch house, a fait accompli in which she had no input, the crack becomes a chasm. Elna is not a woman comfortable with excess and raising her two children, Maeve and Danny, with nannies, cooks, and housekeepers in a fishbowl (Patchett makes much of the floor to ceiling windows that allow people on the street to peer right through from front to back) is anathema to her. And so she disappears.

This novel is a poignant look at the way people react to untenable situations and the fallout they leave in their wake. Love and incredible loneliness forge the bond between Maeve and her much younger brother Danny. The Dutch house, despite the desperate efforts of the "help," sisters Sandy and Jocelyn, is large, cold, and devoid of love. Cyril without Elna is a shell of a man, a tragic figure who is incapable of showing empathy to his children. 

A stepmother eventually arrives on the scene, bringing her own two little girls into the mix, but they are never fully formed characters, serving only as foils for the deeper development of the sibling relationship between the ferociously protective Maeve and her reluctant acolyte Danny.

When their father dies suddenly the two are shocked to discover that he, too, has abandoned them. Banished from the Dutch house, they form an alliance that is both unhealthy and a salvation, leading Maeve, a smart, tough, quirky heroine, to subsume her entire existence into a push for Danny to succeed, whether he wants to or not. Her motto would appear to be that "living well is the best revenge."

The story is told in hindsight by Danny, a comfortable if unreliable narrator. (I understand that Tom Hanks reads the audio version of the novel) After all, his mother left when he was only two-years-old while Maeve, who was seven, sees their childhood through an entirely different lens. Whose is true? Well, that's the mystique of memory, isn't it?