Recent Reviews
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner on October 13, 2019
https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/dutch-house-a-powerful-drama-about-family-and-memory/
Ann Patchett’s remarkable new novel ‘The Dutch House’ dives deep into family dynamics, the amorphous nature of memory and the power of the past to shape the present. Patchett continues the theme of her superb book, ‘Commonwealth’: adult children sorting through the detritus of parents’ troubled lives. Patchett’s graceful prose is rich with references to fairy tales and parables. The result is a novel dense with human drama and layers of meaning.
After WWII, Cyril Conroy is a poor man. Due to one successful investment, he becomes wealthy and purchases an iconic house in a suburb of Philadelphia. “Be careful what you wish for” could be the novel’s subtitle; this acquisition is the beginning of the end of Cyril’s happy family and sizable fortune. The mansion, once owned by a Dutch family, is ornate, opulent and architecturally significant. Cyril is confident his new bride, Elna, will fall in love with its lavish beauty. He couldn’t have been more mistaken. Elna, who had considered becoming a nun, hates the ostentatious house. One day, she permanently leaves the Dutch House and her family, choosing instead to help the poor.
This abandonment creates trauma for her three-year-old son, Danny and most especially for her ten-year-old daughter, Maeve. Eventually, their father remarries. His new wife, Andrea, and her two daughters move into the Dutch house, dislodging Danny from his childhood and displacing Maeve from her bedroom. When Cyril Conroy dies unexpectedly four years later, the stepmother, Andrea, cruelly throws Maeve and Danny out of the Dutch house that she now owns. Maeve becomes Danny’s guardian and protector.
Narrated from Danny’s point of view, the novel follows Maeve and Danny as they attempt to make sense of the events that led to their eviction. Though they obtain college degrees, secure jobs, and in Danny’s case, marry and have kids, Maeve and Danny are bonded to one another and trapped in the past. For decades they keep returning to the Dutch House as if a magnetic force is pulling them toward it. While parked across the street, they sit in Maeve’s car and gaze at their old home. With anger, sadness and humor, they examine their past. Maeve shares memories of their mother with Danny. Together, they analyze their enigmatic father and resent their mean stepmother. Danny’s wife says, “It’s like you’re Hansel and Gretel. You just keep walking through the dark woods holding hands no matter how old you get. Do you ever get tired of reminiscing?”
Their mother’s painful abandonment, their father’s careless choices and their stepmother’s petty vindictiveness alter the trajectories of their lives. As the single remnant of their childhoods, the Dutch House becomes a kind of museum of their memories. Then one morning, when Maeve is forty-nine and Danny forty-two, an unexpected event occurs and they decide to stop parking across the street. Twenty-seven years have passed since their expulsion. They realize, “We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it.”
Yet the story is far from over. The Dutch House’s grip on their lives lessens but does not vanish. They must once again broaden their perspective of their past and open themselves to an unforeseen present.
Ann Patchett is like an archeologist excavating an emotional ruin. Her two main characters ask questions, analyze facts and arrive at hypotheses that morph with time and greater understanding. Danny and Maeve acknowledge that their memories might be unreliable and shaped to align with the narrative they created. But isn’t that the nature of recollection?
The surprise ending is moving without being maudlin. Acceptance, forgiveness and healing occur in unexpected ways. Ann Patchett’s talents as a writer are evident on every page. As one character says, “Sometimes you’ve got to put the past in the past.” With empathy, Ann Patchett shows us why that is easier said than done.
Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane
Alert: This review has spoilers.
In this transcendent novel, Mary Beth Keane’s talent for describing people’s inner lives appears on every page. Nuanced and insightful, the characters in Ask Again, Yes feel authentic and alive. The novel explores the emotional fallout of a tragedy that involves two families. Is forgiveness possible? What do we owe our families amid a calamity?
The year is 1973. Both Frankie Gleeson and Brian Stanhope are New York City rookie cops. When they each begin to start the families, they each move to the suburbs and coincidently land next door to each other. Francis and Lena soon have three daughters: the youngest named Kate. Anne and Brian Stanhope have one son whose name is Peter. The adults don’t interact with each other. Francis tells his daughter Kate to stay away from Peter’s mother, “Something’s not right.” When Peter and Kate enter school, they become close friends. Then a mental illness induced tragedy strikes when Kate and Peter are fourteen. Peter’s mother shoots Kate’s father. The repercussions from this shocking event will entangle the Gleasons and the Sandhopes in perpetuity.
Keane’s keen knowledge of the human condition allows the characters’ inner thoughts to propel the plot rather than external events. Yes, life moves on after the shooting. Everyone lives, though in a state of emotional and physical pain. There are graduations and job promotions, weddings and funerals, but Keane’s focus is on these characters’ internal reflections. Like a kaleidoscope, she shifts the narration, so readers learn the thoughts of Kate and Peter, Francis and Lena and Brian and Anne.
Kate and Peter’s love story dominates. The book’s cover made this plot seem sensational: the enigmatic title certainly added to that impression. Yet in Keane’s skilled hands, the notion that Kate and Peter would want to be with each other seems entirely believable. People who experience trauma together often gravitate toward one another. The fall out from the shooting dominates Kate and Peter’s inner lives. How could it not? They each experience grief, guilt and anguish for their parents and themselves. In the uproar and upheaval that follows, Peter moves to another town to live with an uncle. Kate’s father lingers in the hospital. As they move through their teens and into their twenties, Peter and Kate can think of nothing but each other. All four parents are living with pain and exhort Kate and Peter not to find each other. But they do - and all the family members must now navigate the complex maze of emotional dynamics and begin to understand the heartbreak of mental illness. As a psychiatrist tells Peter’s mother, “You repeat what you do not repair.”
Ask Again, Yes is a thoughtful rumination on how people navigate complicated feelings. She explores the passing of time, the randomness of life’s big choices, the need for understanding, the persistent ignorance around mental health issues, and the importance of forgiveness. The ending moved me in its simplicity and beauty. There is healing and mercy, compassion and empathy. Ask Again, Yes, is one of the most satisfying novels I have read this year. Thanks to the DJKKS Book Club.
The Last Train to London by Meg Waite Clayton
This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner on September 8, 2019
https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/dutch-heroine-saves-jewish-children-in-last-train/
Recent bestsellers like ‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz’ and ‘The Lilac Girls’ focus on the horrors of the Holocaust and the barbarity of the concentration camps. A new novel by Bay Area resident, Meg Waite Clayton, ‘The Last Train to London’ is a fictionalized account of how Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer personally saved a thousand Jewish children from those camps. Her excellent novel enriches the genre and brings to life this brave Dutch heroine.
The novel begins in 1936. Wijsmuller-Meijer, known as Tante Truus, with help from her husband Joop, has been rescuing small groups of children and transporting them out of Germany. Courageous and cunning, she bribes Nazis, endures jail and withstands Gestapo interrogations. Her training as a social worker, her Christian faith and perhaps the sadness of not being able to have children propel her to save innocent lives.
Two young people saved by Tante Truus are Stephan Neuman and Žofie-Helene Perger. In another time, Stephan and Žofie’s courtship might be carefree, but in this dangerous time, their friendship becomes a matter of life and death. Though not religious, Stephan’s family is Jewish. He lives with his mother, father and five-year-old brother Walter in a lavish house in Vienna adorned with paintings by Van Gogh, Klimt and Kokoschka. Žofie is not Jewish. But because her mother publishes scathing editorials about Hitler’s evil regime, Žofie and her family are not safe either. Initially, Stephan and Žofie ignore the Nazi thugs. But after the annexation of Austria by the Nazis in March of 1938, the Nazis intensify their sinister policies. All Jews are subject to escalating viciousness. Stephan is no longer allowed in school. The Nazis loot Stephan’s family’s apartment. They beat Stephan’s father and drag him into a truck headed for a camp.
True to the historical record, Tante Truus encounters Adolph Eichmann. Before the war, Eichmann has been working his way up the Nazi hierarchy. As head of Jewish Office in Vienna, he cynically studies the Viennese Jewish leaders and their culture. Eichmann has not yet written his diabolical “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”, but his cruelty is already evident.
In November of 1938, after the ransacking and destruction of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues, the British Parliament votes to expedite the rescue of Jewish children. This effort becomes known as the Kindertransport. The English refugee aid leaders believe Tante Truus might be able to persuade Eichmann to let some children leave. In a climactic scene, she meets with the creepy and controlling Eichmann. He makes a joke of her request and for unknown reasons allows six hundred Jewish children to depart Vienna. His caveat: they must go on the Sabbath, a day Orthodox Jews are prohibited from traveling. Thanks to Tante Truus, Žofie, Stephan, and Stephan’s brother, Walter, are three of the six hundred children who escape that day. Between 1938-1940, over ten thousand children find refuge in England.
Clayton’s book is clearly the product of prodigious historical research. It captures the wave of hate and intimidation directed at Vienna’s Jewish community even before WWII begins. While the anti-Semitism is vividly captured, I would have liked to hear more about the rich traditions of the Viennese Jewish community before the Nazis.
‘The Last Train to London’ serves as a reminder that even in dangerous times, each one of us can make a difference. Without resistance, extremist ideologies ferment into full-blown lawlessness. When asked about her boldness, Tante Truus said, “My father used to say courage isn’t the absence of fear, but rather going forward in the face of it.” What is vital about this novel is not that it helps us understand the inhumanity of the Nazis, but rather, it helps us imagine the inspiring humanity of those who opposed them. Thanks to Meg Waite Clayton for bringing Tante Truus to life at this moment when cruelty is once again on the march.
