Should you tell your story in chronological order?

This post discusses the entire plot of The Dutch House, including the ending.

We’ve looked closely at the opening of The Dutch House and then at chapter five to study how they work—examining 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’ll zoom back out and look at the overall structure of the plot, specifically at the way Patchett uses chronology, jumping around in time rather than telling the story sequentially. Why does she choose this strategy and how does it work?

As I noted in my analysis of the opening, we get many clues in the first chapters that the story is being narrated by an older version of our protagonist, 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 full circle back 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 narrates 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, who made a fortune in real estate and raised Danny to believe he’d take over the business one day, 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. See the figure below for a visual snapshot. The events chronicled in the book span roughly fifty years, from 1957 to the early 2000s, with roughly equal periods dedicated to various epochs in Danny’s life. The book order follows the general trajectory of Danny’s life; he’s eight years old when we first meet him and in his fifties in the final scene. But along the way, Patchett jumps forward in time for select scenes to give us a glimpse of an older Danny and occasionally reaches backward in time as well. 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, an expensive New England boarding school. 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 examined in my post on the opening—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.”

At this stage, early in the novel, 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. Chapters two and three 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 medical school in New York; he and Maeve still park outside the Dutch House when he visits Philadelphia. 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 choices, including his decision (or, more correctly, Maeve’s decision for him) to attend medical school.

We get a couple more clues too: A brief conversation with a former neighbor reveals that Andrea is unfriendly and seems sad, that Maeve often parks in front of the Dutch House, and 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, which comes in chapter five. I analyzed the first scene of that chapter—Danny’s childhood trip to Brooklyn with his father—in my post on that scene. In the second scene, Patchett 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:

And yet despite this insight about the patterns of the past, we later discover that right about this same time, chronologically, Danny unwittingly reenacts two stories from his father’s life: He marries a woman who has fundamentally different goals than he does, and he buys her, as a surprise, a house she doesn’t want.

Chapters six and seven finally reveal the mystery of why Danny and Maeve are parked outside the Dutch House: Their father died without a will, leaving Andrea with control of everything except for a trust established for the education of Danny and his 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 through fifteen, focus on Danny’s young adulthood, as he finishes medical 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 backward in time as well as forward. 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 midpoint of the novel, that the book pivots. Having already closed most of the story questions opened by the early chapters, Patchett introduces some new ones, heralded by the first sentence of chapter eleven: “It fell to Sandy to call and tell me Maeve was in the hospital.” From the midpoint on, the chronology of the book 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—returns to the live narrative. The second half of the novel untangles and retells the stories, now lore, of the first half of the novel. The one big time jump, in chapter sixteen, takes us back twenty years, but to a moment of prescience about the future from Maeve. The siblings are sitting outside the Dutch House once again, this time discussing death. Maeve, a diabetic since childhood, correctly foretells her own death; Danny, characteristically, isn’t willing to contemplate it.

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 then for 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 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:

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. As a young man, Danny thinks he’s already learned, as he says to Maeve early in the book, that “we overlay the present onto the past.” But Patchett shows us it isn’t until the end of the novel, decades later, that he perhaps is beginning to understand the words he himself has spoken.

Patchett uses a baking metaphor to describe her writing process:

This process of writing back into the book is the work of revision, not the work of drafting. A complex chronology such as the one we’ve analyzed here is something that can be constructed only after you know each part of your story and your characters thoroughly. At that point you can think about how you want your reader to experience the story. The reading process unfolds in time, and you, the author, get to control your reader’s experience of the time of the novel. If you want to read more about novels with complex chronologies, see my posts on Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me and Rebecca Roanhorse’s Black Sun, and the chapter on Mick Herron’s The Secret Hours in the book.

Before we leave The Dutch House and turn our attention to another novel, I want to point out that Patchett—already an experienced author, with seven novels behind her—threw away an entire early draft of this novel and started again. In an interview, she returns to a baking metaphor in talking about that decision:

I hope you never reach that point with one of your own drafts and decide you need to start wholly from scratch—but I think it’s important to remember that you can.

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