The Dutch
House
The Topeka
School
The World That
We Knew
ANN PATCHETT’S NEW
family saga explores
the tight, wounded
bond between siblings
Danny and Maeve. They
come of age in circum-
stances resembling a
dark fairy tale—a long-
lost mother, a wicked
stepmother, a bizarrely
ornate house—and,
in adulthood, resist let-
ting go of their painful
memories. Patchett
(Commonwealth) con-
fidently glides through
the years, and her phil-
osophical inquiry only
intensifies. In his nos-
talgic storybook voice,
Danny, our narrator,
admits, “We’d made
a fetish out of our mis-
fortune, fallen in love
with it.” The narrative
can feel slight: Maeve,
held in Danny’s image,
is kept at a distance,
and dramatic incident
here is minimal. Yet the
book lingers as it drifts
along, dreamily, like any
good fairy tale—setting
in its hooks with an
indelible sadness.
B+ —David Canfield
BEN LERNER (10:04)
discards the riveting
first-person immediacy
of his previous novels for
a more wide-ranging
approach, to mixed
results. Set in the Kan-
sas capital circa 1996,
Topeka shifts between
the perspectives of
Adam Gordon, a high
school senior and
champion debater (as
Lerner was), and his
“lefty” parents, lauded
psychologists (like
Lerner’s parents were)
in a strained marriage.
Interludes focused on
Adam’s troubled class-
mate, who commits
a heinous act of vio-
lence, ominously build
suspense; Lerner adds
context via notes from
Adam in the present
day. Topeka searingly
links the Clinton years
to the current era’s
terrors, but hits too
many targets—Bob
Dole, Fred Phelps, and
Donald Trump all star
here too—for Lerner’s
ferocious prose to grip
you as it should. B —DC
SURVIVAL IS KEY IN THIS
World, which opens in
Berlin, 1941, and follows
three young women
evading Nazi capture:
12-year-old Lea; her
supposed relative Ava;
and Ettie, the teenage
daughter of a rabbi
tasked to watch over
them. Then there’s the
classic Alice Hoffman
spin: Ava is a mystical
golem, rooted in Jew-
ish myth, summoned
by Ettie for protection.
Over years, Ava guides
Lea and Ettie through
a bleak European
landscape, setting
the stage for a pair of
extraordinary but diver-
gent journeys. Hoffman
(Practical Magic) has
never been a subtle
writer, but in this milieu
her heavy hand shows:
From the first scene
(a grim near-rape), con-
trasts of good and evil
are too bluntly drawn,
and her inspiring hero-
ines lack dimension. At
least the author hasn’t
lost her feel for a fine-
tuned plot. B– —DC
AUTHOR
Ann Patchett
PAGES
352
AUTHOR
Ben Lerner
PAGES
304
AUTHOR
Alice Hoffman
PAGES
384
Fiction
Revıews
fantasy?) Dancer feels like a natural
bridge between those two projects,
and the product of a lot of carefully
considered passion, too. Nearly
every paragraph is laced through
with dense, gorgeously evocative
descriptions of a vanished world
and steeped in its own vivid vocabu-
lary: Slaves are the Tasked; masters
are Quality; those sent down to be
sold are “gone Natchez-way.”
The other constant is pain; not
just the hurt of a motherless boy
whose white father cares for him
only conditionally, pleased by his
handiness and quick brain, but the
much broader stain of slavery—the
constant ache, he confides, “of being
born into a world of forbidden vict-
uals and tantalizing untouchables—
the land around you, the clothes
you hem, the biscuits you bake.
You bury the longing, because you
know where it must lead.”
Though it’s easy to get lost in
the lushness of Coates’ language,
Dancer sometimes misses that par-
ticular novelistic trick of telling a
story that truly sweeps you up; the
kind so compelling it almost makes
the pages turn themselves. Even
as Hiram embarks on a sort of
Horatio Alger adventure from the
repressive South to the free North
via the Underground Railroad,
encountering heroes and villains
and becoming an integral member
of the resistance along the way, the
plot gets lodged in digressions and
cul-de-sacs —leaning heavily on blue-
mist atmosphere and characters
who speak less like humans than
oracles in long, lyrical turns. Hiram’s
supernatural gifts, too, feel a little
bit apart from it all, and maybe even
unnecessary. There’s already so much
ordinary magic in his world. B+
← Painting by
Calida Garcia
Rawles, inspired
by The Water
Dancer
↓ Ta-Nehisi
Coates
Books
EW ● COM OCTOBER 2019 117
(OPPOSITE PAGE) CALIDA GARCIA RAWLES (THIS PAGE) BENNETT RAGLIN/GETTY IMAGES FOR GORDON PARKS FOUNDATION
