Ann Patchett pulls me into the lives of "The Dutch House"

Ann Patchett's novel "The Dutch House" was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. First place went to Colson Whitehead's "The Nickel Boys." I have yet to read Whitehead's novel but did read his amazing "The Underground Railroad." 

"The Dutch House" was my first Patchett novel. I don't know what took me so long. She's an amazing writer and owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville. Novelist and bookstore owner -- two full-time jobs. I read Patchett's novel via Kindle from Amazon as I require large-print books or enlargeable print e-books for my clunky eyesight. In the future, I will acquire my print books at indies such as Parnassus. I can get e-books at Libby and a large assortment of large-print books at the Ormond Beach Public Library. It's crucial in these dark times to keep alive the light of good literature and the nonprofit literary world. The fact that Tom Hanks narrates the "The Dutch House" audiobook is enough for me to get it just to hear what Hanks does to the first-person voice of the narrator.

"The Dutch House" follows the lives of a family and their house from the title. The house was built by a Dutch family in Elkins Park just north of Philadelphia. It's ornate and weird, inhabited by others after the aging Dutch wife died with no heirs. Buyer was Cyril Conroy, a World War II veteran and man of seemingly modest means. He loves the place. His young wife hates it. And his children, Maeve and Danny, grow up obsessed with it after their father's second wife throws them out. The tale is told by Danny.

It has a Dickensian flavor to it. Both the house and the characters loom large. A  bit like the painting of Maeve on the cover of the book's first edition (painting by Noah Saterstrom). The setting isn't the gritty hovels of 1840s London but the polite environs of  Philadelphia and New York City. I was caught up in their lives and was heartbroken at the end. I loved the characters so much I didn't want to see them go. That takes skill, bringing a cast to life so we are bereft when they exit the final page. I don't want a sequel but do want them to hang around for a spell like the ghosts who inhabit the house. 

The book ends with the lingering feeling that we all live parallel lives in the houses we have inhabited. How many times have you driven by "the old place" and been hit with a sense of longing?

That's "The Dutch House." 

One final note: I downloaded a "Kindle Unlimited" post-apocalyptic novel to read following Padgett. I read all kinds of books. But this one was all action and style. I won't name the book because it's a book and there's a writer who worked hard on it and I don't want to hurt feelings. I've written many novels, all unpublished, and it is a lot of work. So, as I cast around for my next read, I won't settle. 

Halloween 2025: Lobsters roam the neighborhood

A big lobster walked down our street last night. He/She/It accompanied kids dressed as characters from kiddie shows I don't watch because no more kiddies. But they're in my neighborhood, swarms of families doing what we did with our kids, getting them into costume, grab a bag, panhandle for candy. Chris dressed as Smart Cookie and my son Kevin was Spiderman. They staffed a table by the sidewalk, prepared for the kids. Other neighbor did the same thing. The young marrieds across the street broadcast seasonal tunes. Decades ago, Chris stayed at home as candy-giver and I marched the kids around the neighborhood. One night it was just my daughter and her pal. Indian Summer day gives way to blustery afternoon and sundown rain. The snow came when we finished the first block. Snow crusted their outfits but they ignored my pleas to head home. Halloween! Candy by the bagful once a year. Lights and costumes, family together. My Mom used to dress us up, hand us each a pillowcase, and send us on our way. Kids stream from every house on the street, a mass of post-war boomer babies move as one, parents hold their own bash, peer out the window just to check. No concern about razor blades in candy bars. We brought home apples, oranges, Milky Ways popcorn balls, nickels. Candy canes. The usual Tootsie Rolls. The stars were out here last night; a gentle breeze blew. A lobster strolled by.

Always a good time to read Maya Angelou's Still I Rise

I look to poetry to ease the pain I feel at the ransacking of my country's democratic principles -- and the destruction of our White House. I didn't automatically go to the poets and writers of the 1920s and 1930s, that era of uprisings in the writing world. I didn't go to the 1960s and 1970s, my time as a young man trying to understand why an America I worshipped was murdering people in Southeast Asia in my name. I sometimes send my readers to that past. But I came across Maya Angelou's poem "Still I Rise" on the Poetry Foundation's web site. It speaks to this time, when fascists are in charge of the three branches of our government. I'd say read it and weep, but if you ain't weeping already, I have no words.

But Maya Angelou does:

Still I Rise (excerpt)

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

At sea level, remembering making mile-high muffins

Mile High Muffins

Muffix mix, two eggs, two-thirds cup water and canola oil, mix well and add blueberries from a can. May need to add more water and a dash of flour. Mix again. Spoon into muffin pan and cook at 400 for time stated on package plus four or five more minutes. It’s science, this Wyoming cooking. Takes longer for water to boil for tea. The oxygen is thinner so sea-level cooks may need to sit-a-spell while the muffins bake. It gives the cook time to look out the kitchen window, see the quaking aspens and their gold leaves, the sheen of frost on the browning lawn. Apples hang from the old fruit tree that’s missing a major limb. The fire hedge blazes. The muffins bake. I stand on an ancient sea.

 

Read a presidential book on NO KINGS DAY 2025

My presidential bookcase, No Kings Day

In the Soup: Retired CSU professor John Calderazzo reads in the library

Poetry books arrived this week. The first was “In the Soup,” the second book of poetry by John Calderazzo. John lives in the foothills outside the tiny town of Bellevue, Colorado just north of Fort Collins and Colorado State University. John taught literary nonfiction during his time in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at CSU. He was one of my faculty mentors and I enlisted his expertise as a literary fellowship juror during my time at the Wyoming Arts Council. He still writes and teaches in that genre but explores poetry in retirement.

John writes of many topics but travel is a big one. He is a world traveler so writes about trips to Peru and other overseas locations. His U.S.-based poems are set on Flattop Mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park, Elk Mountain in Wyoming, and Santa Cruz Island in California.  He dedicates some to friends and colleagues. “Kraken” is dedicated to Richard Jacobi, whom I knew in Casper, Wyo. John hears from Richard and his wife, retired University of Wyoming professor Vicki Lindner, about recent falls which, at a certain age, leads to complications, something this person of a certain age knows only too well. After watching a video of his Peru nephew’s toddler son falling over as he tried to walk, John  writes: “I sense what’s reaching out for him—gravity, the Kraken,/tentacled monster of the deep—already taking/his measure.”

The natural world has always featured heavily in John’s writing. In “Gathering Voltage,” he’s in the mountains again, this time in a summer lightning storm. He and his brother-in-law crouch as a bolt hits nearby and he feels “the fatal breath of the sky.” On another day, he rides his mountain bike in a storm: “Shivering as I fly, I sense a lightning/bolt moving into position, gathering/voltage, checking its GPS, its terrible/book of names.”

The author is not always in the wilderness. Sometimes, “The Retired Professor Reads in the Library.” He’s researching a travel essay and is in the aisle with his books and “old-time reporter’s notebooks.” He moves aside to let a student pass and wonders if the young man just sees “Him again—the old guy.” Thing is, he’s “as happy as I was at 10, freed from class to roam the school library.” I know the feeling, the old guy with his walker, crowding the aisle, as he reads a book pulled from the shelves but not sitting instead at one of the tables reserved for the elderly. If asked, I might tell you that some of the glory in the library is being there in the crowded aisle with my friends, the books.

"The Darker Moods of My Father" took me back to my own youth in the 1960s and '70s. He contemplates his father's "darker moods" and his rants on Vietnam and antiwar protesters and "priests drunk on holy water." Meanwhile, the writer remembers "this thing/that wanted to cannon me into jungle mud/since I'd turned eighteen." The poem ends with a revelation about his parents, about how his mother cautioned her husband about going too far with his his diatribes and the father looks sheepish, "knowing he'd gone too far, back in those days/when it was still possible to go too far." Suddenly we're back in 2025, when every day is a lesson on going too far.

John’s book is published by Middle Creek Publishing and Audio: The Literature of Human Ecology. A fine-looking book, printed in a large and very readable sans-serif type. The publisher is based in Pueblo Mountain Road in Beulah, Colorado, which is located between Pueblo and the mountains. I mention this because there are many fine small publishers tucked into many small places. My old friend Nancy Curtis runs High Plains Press from her ranch near Glendo, Wyoming, just a few miles off I-25 down a rutted dirt road that can turn into gumbo during a heavy rain. Anhinga Press has two co-directors in Tallahassee but founder Rick Campbell supervises from his windswept outpost on the Gulf of Mexico (MEXICO!).

One more thing. Some small presses receive support through their local and state arts agencies or some get National Endowment for the Arts publishing grants. I should say they used to get grants but not anymore from the battered NEA and not anymore in Florida where the Governor is on a scorched-earth campaign against the arts and the liberal arts education.

A sad state of affairs. My career was based on connecting local arts groups and publishers to government funding which they had to match 1-to-1. Most of the time, the government dollar was matched many times over. The U.S. government is now in the hands of a wrecking crew that wants to demolish poetry and prose, arts and education. They want to destroy everything I hold dear.

John Calderazzo writes about everything I want to preserve and protect.

My father, standing in a field in France, Feb. 13, 1945

My father, 21, standing out in a field in France, February 1945. He writes a caption to the photo: “I hadn’t had a haircut in three months. I should have worn a hat.” He lives in a tent, a GI far from his home in Denver covered in Colorado snow. His war will be over in three months but he won’t return home for another year. He stands in a French field that's browned by winter, farm house in the distance. He writes that his hair is too long, that maybe he should have had a haircut before turning over the small camera to a buddy whose shadow lingers in the foreground. He takes my father's photo that will end up 82 years later in his eldest son’s desk drawer in Ormond Beach, Florida. You were right, Dad. You should have worn a hat. That hair of yours is curly, too curly, too youthful for a soldier who spent Christmas in the frozen Ardennes, in The Bulge, on the radio. He relays artillery coordinates, asks HQ where a young man might get a haircut for a future photo of him standing in a French field looking lonely, unshorn, very much alive.