I’ve just had a heart attack and this has been the happiest day of my life.” Danny can’t bring himself to disrupt the newfound companionship between the women, so he relegates himself to the sidelines, where he tries to supervise silently. In the hospital, Maeve tells Danny, “‘I’m so happy. Her neediness draws Elna to her side.ĭanny begrudgingly accepts his mother’s late appearance in his life, mostly to appease Maeve, whose heart attack precipitates Elna’s return. Other people in his life-including a chorus of former domestic employees at the Dutch House named Sandy, Fluffy, and Jocelyn-insist that his mother is a “saint.” This saintly behavior eventually extends to Andrea, who, in one of the novel’s strongest scenes, sees Danny standing on the lawn of the Dutch house, mistakes him for her late husband, and begins hitting the window “like a warrior beats a drum.” Though Elna is repulsed by the gaudy mansion, she moves back into the house to care for Andrea, who is suffering from either Alzheimer’s or aphasia, her family isn’t sure which. Danny is the only person who cannot absolve Elna. For Maeve, it turns out, this type of love is reserved for their absent mother.Įlna is referred to in worshipful tones by everyone except her son, who remembers none of her merits but suffers the sting of abandonment. In these sessions, which they conduct for most of their lives together, Danny’s love for his sister-her beauty, her ferocious intelligence, her caretaking of her brother, her general kindness and decency-grows and calcifies until it is greater than any love in his life.

Following Elna’s willful departure, Cyril’s sudden heart attack, and Andrea’s dismissal, the now-grown siblings establish a habit of parking on their old street with a view of their former home to hash out the past and consider their future.

It is, most crucially, the site of narrator Danny Conroy’s cherished conversations with Maeve, his elder sister. It is also the site of Cyril’s second, catastrophic marriage to Andrea, a cruel stepmother who disinherits his children after his death. The “Dutch house” in a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia is the site of Cyril Conroy’s failed first marriage to Elna, a woman who flees the ornate excesses of the home. In her eighth novel, Patchett revisits the concerns of previous works, including Commonwealth (the shifting plates of family life after divorce the bonds among siblings the process of forgiveness) and Run (the absent mother, the creation of family).

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