Should you tell your story in chronological order?
In previous posts on The Dutch House, I looked closely at the opening and then at chapter five to study how they work—what tools and tactics Ann Patchett uses to draw us into the narrative and then keep the plot and characters moving along. In this post I want to step back and look at the overall structure of the plot, specifically at the way Patchett uses chronology, showing us different parts of the story rather than staying in sequence. Why does she choose this strategy and how does it work?
Spoiler warning (and why I think you should read the post anyway): I’m going to reveal many of the key plot points of The Dutch House in this post, so if you have already embarked on reading the book and want to experience it without foreknowledge, then go back to your reading and return here when you are done! That said, plot suspense is only one of the riches of this book, and knowing the plot moves ahead of time might in fact make you a better reader, able to pick up foreshadowing and other nuances you would have otherwise missed. I can tell you that I was just as enthralled by the novel the second time through as I was the first.
As I noted in my analysis of the opening, we get many cues in the first chapters that the story is being narrated by an older version of our main character, Danny. Just how much older we don’t know until the very last chapter of the book, at which point he has returned to the Dutch House, now owned by his twenty-something daughter, May. Early in the novel, in chapter six, Danny was kicked out of the Dutch House by Andrea, his stepmother, following his father’s death, and one path of the book is to take him back full circle to the house, to give him a new relationship with it. The Dutch House is about inheritance in all its forms—houses, yes, but also stories and our other frameworks for making sense of the world.
How does the loss and restitution of the Dutch House happen? And how does Patchett control the way Danny unspools the story? At almost precisely the midpoint of the book, Danny muses, “In retrospect, it looked perfectly obvious but at the time I might as well have been standing with my back to a craps table, throwing dice over my shoulder.” He’s talking about a lucky real estate deal that marks the beginning of the small empire he builds to replace his lost inheritance from his father, but the first part of the sentence could be the tagline to the whole book, to his whole life. In retrospect, it looked perfectly obvious.
Let’s take a quick look at the chronology of the novel. The novel spans roughly fifty years, from 1957 to the early 2000s, with roughly equal periods dedicated to various epochs in Danny’s life. In the graphic below, you’ll see the chronological order on the left, with various periods marked off by color. On the right is the book order, with the two part breaks marked by black lines. (The red line is the halfway mark and also marks a pivot point in the plot I’ll discuss below.)
The book order follows the general trajectory of Danny’s life; he’s eight years old when we first see him and in his fifties in the final scene. But along the way, Patchett jumps forward in time for just a scene at a time to give us a snapshot of an older Danny. What’s happening in those scenes and why does she position them where she does? Let’s take a look at a few of them to see how they work.
Right away, Patchett establishes a rhythm that will become familiar in the first half of the novel. After the opening scene introducing Andrea and the Dutch House, the second scene jumps forward in time by several years. Danny is now fifteen, home on spring break from his first semester at Choate. The scene is set not inside the Dutch House, however, but outside it, the two siblings watching from Maeve’s car as the house lights up when evening sets in. They remember the scene we’ve just read—Andrea’s concern about the grand front windows not providing privacy. “Sure enough,” Danny thinks now, “you could see right into the house, through the house, not with any detail of course but memory filled in the picture.”
In fact, Maeve and Danny’s habit of parking outside the Dutch House is alluded to in the first scene as well. Embedded in the ‘live’ scene in which they meet Andrea for the first time is a bit of backstory that fills in some key details. Danny’s earliest memory, it turns out, is of being hit with a wooden spoon by his nanny, who was having an affair with Danny’s father following the departure of his mother. “The news of this affair came to me as most information did: many years after the fact, in a car parked outside the Dutch House with my sister.”
At this stage, Patchett is drawing us in by opening a series of story questions, primary among them why Maeve and Danny are outside the Dutch House rather than inside. The next few chapters fill in our picture of what is happening inside the house—and the family—immediately before and after Andrea marries Danny’s father. Our next chronology break comes after the brief first scene of chapter four, showing the wedding itself, and places us a decade later. Danny is now in med school; he and Maeve still park outside the Dutch House. Danny asks Maeve, “Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?” Maeve says she does. Danny responds, “But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.” Danny is in his twenties at this point, parroting something he’s learned in his Intro to Psych class. He doesn’t truly understand yet how his own past—and the stories he and Maeve tell about it—are shaping his present decisions, including his decision (or, more correctly, Maeve’s decision for him) to attend medical school.
We get a couple more clues too: a neighbor appears on the scene to say that Andrea is unfriendly and seems sad, to reveal that Maeve often parks there, to elicit the information that Maeve and Danny haven’t seen Andrea or their stepsisters in years. But this discussion about memory is, I think, the purpose of the scene itself—an opportunity for Patchett to plant a theme touchstone she’ll return to in the next scene out of chronological order.
In that one, the second scene of chapter five (the first scene of which I analyzed in detail in this post), she takes us to 1977 or thereabouts. Danny is still chewing over the question of memory and how reliable it is. He seems to be starting to understand the impact of the stories he and Maeve have been telling themselves about their early lives:
There was no extra time in those days and I didn’t want to spend the little of it I had sitting in front of the goddamn house, but that’s where we wound up: like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. We pretended that what we had lost had been taken from us by the person who still lived inside.
And yet, much later in the book, we find that right about this same time, chronologically, he unwittingly re-enacts two stories from his father’s life: he marries a woman who has fundamentally different goals from himself and he buys her, as a surprise, a house she doesn’t want.
Chapter six and seven finally reveal the mystery of why Danny and Maeve are parked outside the Dutch House: their father has died without a will, leaving Andrea with control of everything except for a trust established for the education of Danny and his younger stepsisters. (The one avenue for revenge open to Maeve is to make sure Danny liquidates this trust, which is why he goes to Choate and medical school despite not wanting to do either one.) Part one of the book ends here.
Part two, chapters eight to fifteen, focus on Danny’s young adulthood, as he finishes med school, embarks on his real estate business, marries Celeste, and starts a family—including a daughter, May, who looks so much like Maeve that, we are told, the portrait on the cover of the book could just as well be a portrait of her. In chapters eight through ten, Patchett is still hopping around in the chronology, now weaving in scenes set backwards in time as well as forwards. In the second scene of chapter ten, Maeve tells Danny the full story of the first time she ever saw the Dutch House, and their mother’s horrified reaction.
It’s after this scene, right at the halfway point (where the red line is in the graphic above), that the book pivots. Having already closed most of the story questions opened by the early chapters, Patchett opens some new ones, heralded by the first sentence of chapter 11: “It fell to Sandy to call and tell me Maeve was in the hospital.” It’s also at this point that Patchett adopts a more straightforward chronology for the book: it moves almost entirely forward rather than looking back, and that’s because the past—first in the form of Maeve and Danny’s mother, and then in the form of Andrea—return to the live narrative. The second half of the novel untangles and retells the stories, now lore, of the first half of the novel.
Finally, in the last chapter of the book, we think we are encountering our narrator in close to real time: “The story of my sister was the only one I was ever meant to tell, but there are still a few things to say.” Those few things bring us quickly and steadily forward in time, past Danny’s divorce from Celeste, through the years required for him to forgive his mother for leaving and returning, past Andrea’s death to May’s purchase of the Dutch House. Patchett leaves us with the image of the beautiful house lit up for a fabulous party attended by May’s glamorous friends, and Danny leading his daughter into the house—the inheritance restored.
Yet there’s a hole here in these last two chapters, one that I think Patchett leaves on purpose to complicate the tidiness of the ending. Danny may have indeed integrated the stories from his past that haunted him for so many years, but if it is his sister’s story he thinks he is telling, there are parts he doesn’t yet know, hasn’t yet explored. Patchett reveals this subtly. Maeve is such a focus of the book, such an anchor for Danny, that her death at the end of chapter eighteen hits hard for us, just as it does for Danny. It’s easy to miss, in the swirl of emotions, the odd, brief little chapter nineteen that follows. It is only a few sentences:
I remember very little about the time just after Maeve died, except for Mr. Otterson, who sat with the family at her funeral Mass and covered his face with his hands as he cried. His grief was a river as deep and as wide as my own. I knew that I should have gone to him later, I should have tried to comfort him, but there was no comfort in me.
Do you see the story buried here? What Patchett is suggesting, I think, is that the work of integration, of continually sifting the stories we tell ourselves, isn’t finished for Danny but will go on. A decade later or maybe two, he’ll come back to this blank spot and try to fill it in, to understand why Mr. Otterson, the man he’s known only as Maeve’s boss for many years, is so grief-stricken.
Our retellings last our whole lives; they are messy and out of order, like a deck of shuffled cards. But we can lay out the cards in front of us and look at them again. Each time we do, another part of the story might emerge.