"The Dutch House"

The image above is a scan of the inside front cover of the January 2021 issue of Harper's Magazine.  I always read advertisements for books, but typically pass over them because there are so many of them, and life is short.  Then as I proceeded through the magazine, I read an extended essay by Ann Patchett entitled "These Precious Days: Tell me how the story ends."  It details her true-life encounter with Tom Hanks' assistant Sooki Raphael, who had pancreatic cancer.  

The essay was very interesting - and extremely well-written.  Part way through, Ann Patchell uses The Dutch House to explain the process by which she writes novels:

This is what it’s like to write a novel: I come up with a shred of an idea. It can be a character, a place, a moral quandary. In the case of The Dutch House, I’d started to think about a poor woman who suddenly became rich, and because she was unable to deal with the change in circumstances, she left her family and went to India to follow a guru.

Sister Nena shook her head. “Not a guru. She’s Catholic. She doesn’t have to go to India. She helps the poor like Dorothy Day.”

We were sitting at the bar at California Pizza Kitchen at four o’clock in the afternoon. It was our place, what Sister Nena called “vacation.” She ordered the house merlot and I had a seltzer with cranberry juice. She wanted to know about the book I was going to write next, the book I had just barely started thinking of.

“This woman goes to India,” I said.

“She could be a nun.” Sister Nena picked up a piece of bread and swiped it through the olive oil in the saucer between us.

I shook my head. “She’s married,” I said. “She has children. She has to have children.”

“It could happen. Plenty of nuns were married before.”

“They were widows, not divorced.”

“You never know.” Then she looked at me, her face suddenly brightened by a plot twist. “She could work for Mother Teresa. If she really wanted to go to India and she wanted to serve the poor, that’s what she would do.”

I wasn’t sure why I was negotiating my character’s future with my friend, but there I was, listening. Did my character want to be a nun?

When I’m putting together a novel, I leave all the doors and windows open so the characters can come in and just as easily leave. I don’t take notes. Once I start writing things down, I feel like I’m nailing the story in place. When I rely on my faulty memory, the pieces are free to move. The main character I was certain of starts to drift, and someone I’d barely noticed moves in to fill the space. The road forks and forks again. It becomes a path into the woods. It becomes the woods. I find a stream and follow it, the stream dries up, and I’m left to look for moss on the sides of trees. For a time, the mother in this novel went to India to work for Mother Teresa. I tried it but it didn’t work. What about the children who were left behind in that house she hated? What became of them? And what about the women who cleaned that house, who fixed those children their dinner? The ones who stayed turned out to be the ones I was interested in.

Putting together a novel is essentially putting together the lives of strangers I’m coming to know. In some ways it’s not unlike putting together my own life. I think I know what I’m doing when in truth I have no idea. I just keep moving forward. By the time the book is written, there is little evidence of the initial spark or a long-ago conversation in California Pizza Kitchen. Still, I’m able, for a while at least, to pick up the thread and walk it back. Everything looks so logical going backward—Yes, of course, that’s what we did—but going forward it’s something else entirely. Going forward, the lights may as well be off.

After reading that, I went back to the front cover and dog-eared the corner, marking it for further attention.

That was January of 2021.  Then... the tempus always fugits, and now it's October of 2022 and I finally request the book from the library.  I'm so glad I did.  It was a joy to read.

If you've read this book (or others by Ann Patchett), please feel free to offer your opinions in the Comments.