◉ Novel Study
Having edited hundreds of novels by this point in my career, I can tell you that the opening is the most challenging section for most writers. You have to walk a narrow path between revealing too much information about your characters and not enough. A successful opening draws readers in, gives them an inside peek at some crucial element of the novel, and raises questions interesting enough to make them want to keep reading in order to get the answers.
Because openings are so important, I’m going to examine the opening of every novel I discuss in this series. You’ll see a range of examples and learn something new from each one. Here are the questions I’ll be asking:
How does the opening pull us into the world of the novel?
What do we know? What’s implied? What’s left as a mystery?
What makes us want to keep reading?
As we take these questions to our first book, The Dutch House by Ann Patchett, let’s start with what the cover and title tell us, for they are indeed part of the meaning of the book. The cover of The Dutch House features a painting, complete with gilt frame, of a girl wearing a red dress with belled sleeves. Her gaze is level and direct, her facial expression serious. Her hands are open in her lap, partially cradling one another, as if she is holding a precious but invisible object—an unusual pose. The background, with its patterned wallpaper and vase of fresh flowers at her elbow, implies wealth. Who is the girl? What is her relationship to the Dutch House of the title? And what is the Dutch House, anyway?
The first paragraph of the novel gives us another clue, but also raises more questions:
The first time our father brought Andrea to the Dutch House, Sandy, our housekeeper, came to my sister’s room and told us to come downstairs. “Your father has a friend he wants you to meet,” she said.
In addition to having a name, the Dutch House has a housekeeper, confirming the impression of wealth. What do we learn about the cast of characters from these lines? We understand intuitively that we are with an older narrator who is inhabiting a younger self. This narrator knows that the “friend” is named Andrea and this is not the last time she’ll be at the Dutch House. The so-far unnamed narrator is close to their sister, signaled by the immediate use of “our” and by the fact that they are together in this moment when Sandy comes to find them. Sandy tells rather than asks them to come downstairs, implying that these siblings are on the young side and also that Sandy has some measure of authority over them. Notice how much of this information is hinted at rather than told to us outright.
After this opening paragraph, we continue with the scene Sandy’s dialogue line has activated:
“Is it a work friend?” Maeve asked. She was older and so had a more complex understanding of friendship.
Sandy considered the question. “I’d say not. Where’s your brother?”
“Window seat,” Maeve said.
Sandy had to pull the draperies back to find me. “Why do you have to close the drapes?”
I was reading. “Privacy,” I said, though at eight I had no notion of privacy. I liked the word, and I liked the boxed-in feel the draperies gave when they were closed.
Patchett trickles out a few more details in this exchange: Maeve is the older sibling; our narrator is an eight-year-old boy. We still don’t know his name or anything about his appearance—details beginning novelists often feel they must deliver to readers right away. What readers are really interested in is the question Maeve is pursuing for us: Who is Andrea and why is she at their house? Sandy’s considering pause, her use of the anodyne word “friend,” which Southerners of my mother’s generation still use to refer to unmarried romantic partners, only heightens our curiosity. Where is the mother of these two children in the Dutch House? Why does their father want them to meet Andrea? Will Andrea become their stepmother? Maeve, it is hinted, with her “more complex understanding of friendship,” may be alert to this possibility. The purpose of her question is to rule it out. If Andrea is a work friend, then perhaps she is not romantically involved with their father.
The last paragraph quoted above gives us our most direct view yet of our narrator, and immediately we are allied with him: Like us, he is reading. The “I” in the sentence “I was reading” is the first “I” voiced by the narrator, the first action he relates of himself. Readers may hear echoes of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which opens with the orphaned Jane tucked away in a curtained window seat of her aunt’s lavish but lonely house, reading a book, before she is violently interrupted by her abusive cousin. The overall message we have received so far is that the Dutch House is not a warm, embracing, nurturing place.
Patchett quickly gets the children into the drawing room. Their father and Andrea don’t notice them yet, focused instead on two formal portraits hanging on the wall. Our narrator goes on to give us a lengthy description of these portraits of Mr. and Mrs. VanHoebeek, “both dressed in black and [standing] with an erect formality that spoke of another time,” but first we get a single dialogue line:
“It must be a comfort, having them with you,” Andrea said to him, not of his children but of his paintings.
Notice how much meaning is layered into that single sentence! Andrea believes, or at least says, that the children’s father must be in need of comfort (and we wonder again, why?). And she is oriented to believe that physical objects, not human relationships, bring comfort. Or does the narrator, relating this remembered scene from his childhood, attribute this belief to her? A few paragraphs later, the narrator confesses, “I will always believe that Andrea’s face fell for an instant when she looked at Maeve and me.” The sentence makes us curious to see how this unpromising relationship between Andrea and the children will unfold. At the same time, the phrase “I will always believe” makes us wonder about the narrator’s reliability; it’s the phrasing of someone who has been presented with evidence to the contrary that he doesn’t wish to accept.
As the scene goes on, the relationships between these characters start to unfold. Finally, on page six, we learn the name of our narrator—Danny—when his father addresses him. The father is, as Patchett primes us to expect, cold and distant, giving Danny attention that is overly critical and ignoring Maeve altogether as far as possible. Woven into the scene, which continues on with a brief discussion about the house and its former acreage, is a great deal of backstory, most of it focused on the Dutch House but also sneakily revealing important details about the family: that Danny’s father bought the house and everything in it, including the paintings, after the VanHoebeeks fell on hard times; that Danny and Maeve’s mother has “left” the family, though we don’t know why; that the father does marry Andrea; that there is long-standing tension between Maeve and Andrea, which some people (but not Danny) believe stems from this very first meeting between the two.
Patchett often launches this backstory material from a specific setting detail, keeping us tethered to the scene unfolding in the drawing room of the Dutch House. For example, we learn more about the portrait we encountered on the cover of the book. It portrays Maeve at the age of ten and was painted by a famous artist brought in from Chicago:
As the story goes, he was supposed to paint our mother, but our mother, who hadn’t been told that the painter was coming to stay in our house for two weeks, refused to sit, and so he painted Maeve instead. When the portrait was finished and framed, my father hung it in the drawing room right across from the VanHoebeeks. Maeve liked to say that was where she learned to stare people down.
Here is a clue to the mother’s absence—and more evidence of the father’s domineering attitude toward his family—as well as insight into the character of Maeve, who refuses to be dominated.
Later in the scene, Andrea gazes at the huge panes of glass surrounding the glass front doors and asks, “Don’t you worry about people looking in?” In response, Patchett, via Danny, offers up a setting description that turns out to be much more than simple description:
Not only could you see into the Dutch House, you could see straight through it. . . . From the driveway you could let your eye go up the front steps, across the terrace, through the front doors, across the long marble floor of the foyer, through the observatory, and catch sight of the lilacs waving obliviously in the garden behind the house.
We understand, intuitively, that what Patchett is offering in this novel is a chance to see through this house and its inhabitants as she holds them up for scrutiny, like insect specimens pinned against illuminated glass. Readers (like us!) alert to theme statements might highlight the first sentence of that passage. We’ll have to keep reading, however, to learn how this observation relates to the novel as a whole.
Takeaways
Use your first lines to make readers curious (who is Andrea?) rather than establish basic information (the narrator’s name).
Don’t reveal too much in your opening paragraphs: Give your readers space and time to make guesses you later confirm.
Make setting details do double duty, like evoke a theme of the novel or reveal backstory.
Introduce your theme subtly in the opening chapters through symbolic details, character actions, or setting descriptions, allowing readers to gradually recognize the underlying ideas.
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Keep exploring
This is one novel’s breakdown from Novel Study — my series reverse-engineering how bestselling books actually work, opening to ending. The full method, with all the charts, is collected in the books.
This post is collected in Novel Study, Book 1 of the series.
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