Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House is even better on second reading

Having a saint in the family is dreadful, They’re often absent, either literally or emotionally, and because they’re always thinking of higher things they can’t be expected to do prosaic stuff like take the rubbish out or pay the gas bill. They tend not to enjoy jokes, much less teasing. Worse still, they’re convinced they’re right about everything. Street angel, house devil, as the old saying has it.

Do-gooders crop up here and there in fiction, from Dickens’s bustling, bossy Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House through to the long- suffering Lady Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited to Ian Bedloe, the miserably stubborn hero of Anne Tyler’s brilliant Saint Maybe. Carol Shields’s latest book, Unless, is about a daughter who drops out of university in order to sit, mute, on a street corner with a sign saying ‘Goodness’ around her neck. Imagine how annoying.

The Dutch House does not at first seem as if it’s about the chaos a saint brings to the family she abandons. It appears to be a marvellously romantic and evocative novel about the nostalgic pull of a lost home. This is the Dutch House, an opulent, sprawling, chandeliered mansion, the childhood home of the narrator Danny Conroy and his beloved sister, Maeve. When their mother disappears, their lives are blighted by the arrival of a wicked stepmother with two little girls of her own. Before long, she has ousted Maeve from her bedroom and banished her to the attic. When their father dies suddenly, they are exiled from the house forever.

For decades afterwards, and for much of the novel, the siblings go and park opposite and sit in the car, smoking and reminiscing. The longed-for house in Le Grand Meaulnes comes to mind: there is a similarly pervasive sense of having lost a paradise which cannot be regained.