The Dutch House Study Guide

Critically acclaimed author Ann Patchett was born in Los Angeles on December 2, 1963, to Jeanne Ray and Frank Patchett (a police captain who arrested Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan). When she was six, her mother remarried, and they moved to Nashville, where Patchett attended Catholic school before eventually heading to Sarah Lawrence College. While she was still a student, her first short story was published in The Paris Review, and after graduating, she earned her MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Patchett spent nearly a decade writing for Seventeen Magazine, and she eventually contributed work to publications such as The New Yorker, Vogue, and The Washington Post. She published her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, in 1992 and found breakout success with 2001’s Bel Canto, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2011, she co-founded Parnassus Books, an independent bookstore in Nashville. The Dutch House (2019) earned the distinctive honor of being a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Despite her public success, Patchett strives to keep her personal life quiet and private. She has no social media presence, doesn’t own a cellphone, and strictly limits her television consumption, all in the service of protecting her writing time. She currently lives in Nashville with her husband.

The historical backdrop of The Dutch House spans most of the 20th century, from the 1910s to 1990s. The earliest historical event mentioned in the novel is World War I, during which Mr. VanHoebeek built his wealth through cigarette sales, allowing him to purchase land and later construct the Dutch House. Cigarettes became extremely popular in the U.S. around WWI and were even given to American soldiers as a part of their rations. Smoking came to be associated with “patriotism,” and demand for the product skyrocketed after the war. Danny attends Columbia University in 1968, a volatile year for the institution. Columbia students protesting the Vietnam War skipped their classes and occupied academic buildings, barricading themselves inside, which ultimately led to a standoff with the police and hundreds of arrests. Later in the novel, Elna explains that she attempted to travel to Calcutta (now Kolkata) to meet and work with Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa, a nun who devoted her life to helping the less fortunate, is best-known for her time in Kolkata, where she founded the Missionaries of Charity. In 1979, she was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for her work, and she was canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church following her death in 1997.

When Maeve and Celeste meet for the first time in The Dutch House, they bond over a shared love for Philip Larkin’s poem, “Home Is So Sad.” Like the novel itself, the poem explores the transience of home and belonging, the often-painful confrontation between attachment and loss. Patchett has cited authors Philip Roth and John Updike as major literary influences. Their works also examine themes of family, identity, and personal history—Roth’s American Pastoral (1997) and Updike’s The Centaur (1963), for instance, delve into intergenerational conflict and the weight of the past. Zadie Smith, whom Patchett greatly admires, also played an indirect role in shaping The Dutch House; during an interview, Smith spoke about writing from fear rather than experience and inspired Patchett to create the character of Andrea. Smith’s Swing Time (2016), like Patchett’s novel, examines the pull of the past and the way that childhood experiences shape one’s identity. Donna Tartt, another writer Patchett reveres, also crafts deeply interior stories of loss, memory, and fate—particularly in the acclaimed The Goldfinch (2013), where a young boy fixates on an object from his past, much as Danny and Maeve obsess over the Dutch House. In their own way, each of these authors share Patchett’s interest in memory and the complex nature of home.