I researched a lot about buildings - I have a neighbor down the street who’s an architect, and I can’t even remember how many times I would call him up and say, ‘Can I come over for a minute?’ He had a great book, which I loved so much that I was always talking about it and a friend of mine tracked it down and bought a copy for me. Mainly about real estate in New York in the late ’60s and through to the 1970s. Patchett has also told interviewers that she did a great deal of research for the novel and relied on many preview readers’ suggestions: “for The Dutch House I did a ton of research. And somebody who has money and loses it, and somebody who has money and walks away from it.” And so I really wanted to write a book about somebody who doesn’t want to be rich. And probably to a certain extent, that’s always been true, but it feels so true now. But this feeling of there would be nothing in the world better than to be superrich, to be a Kardashian, to be a Trump. People keep saying to me, ‘You don’t write political books,’ and I think, wow, I feel like I do. She also states frequently that the novel is a response, to an extent, to the Trump election in 2016: “This book was born out of the Trump election in a lot of ways. The novel has elements of traditional fairy tales, such as a wicked stepmother, stepsisters, a magnificent “castle,” loss, and poverty, Patchett explained that she wanted to write a novel about the kind of stepmother she did not want to be (she became a stepmother when she married her husband).

Indeed, reviews as a whole were laudatory, or at least positive. This paid off: Kirkus Reviews raved over the book in large part because the setting was so alive that it gave the reader the feeling that they could jump into the car, drive to Elkins Park, and find both Maeve and Danny once they got there. She felt that writing about an area she had actually spent time in and felt affection for would give the novel a layer of familiarity and authenticity. The fictional Dutch House of the title is located in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, where the author spent weekends as a college student. It tells the story of two siblings, Danny and Maeve Conroy, and how their abandonment as children leaves them reliant on each other.

The Dutch Houseis a novel by Ann Patchett, published in 2019.

The dutch house book cover