Last week, we analyzed the opening of The Dutch House, examining how Ann Patchett deploys and withholds information to pull us into the novel. This week I want to zero in on a scene later in the novel and approach it much as you would study a physical specimen like a tree or an insect. When we look at the parts of the scene, what do we find? How can we categorize them? Most importantly, how do these components function in the larger organism of the story?

One of the risks of this kind of analysis is getting too caught up in the categories themselves, creating microcategories so specific that we spend more time defining them than analyzing them. So I’ve stuck to broad categories and tried to give them labels that are as clear as possible: action, summary, dialogue, character description, setting, introspection, and backstory.

We’ll drill down into the nuances of these categories as we explore the scene, but let’s start by getting the big picture. There are roughly twelve-and-a-half pages in the first scene of chapter 5, when I read it on the Kindle app on my iPad. Here are the first twelve, with every sentence categorized.

What I notice in this very zoomed-out view is just how little action (yellow), dialogue (pink), and setting (green) Patchett uses in the scene. When we think about what happens in a scene, those are often the elements we focus on: the what, where, and how. These are the elements a screenwriter would focus on when adapting the novel for the screen. In The Dutch House, however, we can see that they are providing the scaffolding for a lot of material we might think of as secondary or background material: character description (bright blue), introspection (darker blue), and summary (orange). There are only a few pages (like 5, 6, and 9) where we stick closely to the ‘live’ scene. In the others, we are more deeply immersed inside the head of our point-of-view character, Danny, watching him react to what he is seeing or hearing or following his compressed recounting of a series of events (those orange summary sections).

We know by the end of chapter 1 that Danny’s father is going to marry Andrea, and the wedding is portrayed in chapter 4. We start chapter 5 with summary, the information that Danny’s sister, Maeve, was only home from college for a few days at Christmas and now has decided to stay at Barnard for Easter. A bit of introspection from Danny, reacting to this news, helps us understand the state of affairs at the Dutch House now that Andrea and her daughters have moved in: “No one could have blamed her, but I blamed her all the same. How was I supposed to get through Easter without her?”

Maeve’s suggestion that he come to New York kicks off the action of the chapter. Danny is surprised that his father is not only willing to let him go but even offers to drive him there and take his two children out to lunch. Danny’s line of introspection here is a gut-punch, reminding us just how lonely his family life has been: “It sounded so nostalgic when he said it, the three of us, as if we had once been a unit instead of just a circumstance.” But Andrea catches wind of the plan and turns it into an excursion for herself and her daughters. Here again, Danny’s interior monologue gets to deliver the final verdict on Andrea’s handful of dialogue lines: “It didn’t matter. I was only missing lunch, that ridiculous notion of the three of us. . . . Disappointment comes from expectation, and in those days I had no expectation that Andrea would get anything less than what she wanted.”

We get a fresh burst of action at the bottom of page two, when Danny’s father rushes them out of the house the next morning, not even giving him time to pack in his hurry to escape Andrea. This unexpected early departure opens up a window of time Danny’s father fills by showing his son around the Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up. Again, Danny’s internal monologue tells us just how surprising this is, how little his father has ever revealed to him: “what I knew about my father was what I saw.” A snippet of backstory illustrates the point: even asking his father whether he would vote for Eisenhower was considered a violation of his privacy. When they get to Brooklyn, his father shows him the building where he used to live and then, even more stunning, the building where Danny’s mother grew up: “The building looked like all the others, but to think that my mother had lived there made me feel like we had landed on the moon, it was that impossible.” As Danny clutches the window bars on the building, his father lists the names of relatives he’s never heard before.

Danny summons the courage to ask why his mother left, prefacing the dialogue question with this line of introspection: “It was the central question of my life and I had never asked before.” His father’s answer comes first in summary—“he told me she was crazy”—and then, prodded by Danny, in dialogue: “Crazy like taking off her coat and handing it to someone on the street who never asked her for a coat in the first place.” His father continues, “There’s no sense wondering about your mother. Everybody’s got a burden in life and this is yours. She’s gone. You have to live with that.”

We’re on page seven now, almost exactly halfway through the chapter. These lines are, appropriately, the hinge the two halves of the chapter pivot around. The remainder of the chapter follows Maeve and Danny as they retrace Danny’s steps in Brooklyn, Danny repeating information that Maeve has never known either. Once, when Maeve asked about her mother, her father told her she “needed to think of her as dead, that she probably was dead by now.” At this point, we get a key piece of backstory—a clue—delivered in dialogue by Maeve. Prompted by Danny asking again why their mother left, Maeve tells him, “All I know for sure was that she hated the house. . . . She told me once if it were up to her she’d give the place to the nuns, let them turn it into an orphanage or an old folks’ home. Then she said the nuns and the orphans and the old folks would probably be too embarrassed to live there.”

Danny, who is aligned with his father in believing that “there was no better house” than the Dutch House, says this does mean their mother was crazy, though he feels badly about it after the words have left his mouth. On his way home, he practices what his father has taught him about putting things out of his mind when the thought of Andrea’s reaction to the trip occurs to him. When he does encounter her, he discovers that he is willing to lie (about seeing a play she had wanted to see) in order to hurt her. He learns, too, that his relationship with his father is unchanged, despite the personal revelations: “we never talked about Brooklyn again.”

If we look at the scene from a story standpoint, what were Patchett’s objectives? And which tools from her available palette does she choose to accomplish each one?

First, the scene answers a story question posed by earlier chapters: How is the marriage between Andrea and Danny and Maeve’s father working out? The answer—it is not working out well for anyone involved, except possibly Andrea herself—requires only a handful of dialogue lines from Andrea, a silent action from her new husband, and a line or two of introspection from Danny. Dialogue and action are tools of showing, and Patchett allows them to do most of the work. Even without Danny’s commentary, the scene at the dinner table discussing the planned trip and the father’s hurried exit would convey what we need to know.

Second, we get more clues to another lingering story question: Why did Danny and Maeve’s mother leave? We learn that both she and her husband grew up in modest circumstances (she was the youngest of several children; her father was a firefighter) and that her husband’s newfound prosperity—and, most especially, the expression of that prosperity in the form of the Dutch House—made her deeply uncomfortable. If a nun would be too embarrassed to live there, what must she have been? Appalled? Mortified? Because this information is entirely backstory, Patchett must tell it rather than show it, but notice all of the showing she surrounds it with: the key bits of information are actually delivered in dialogue from Maeve or Danny’s father as they visit the Brooklyn neighborhood where she grew up.

Third, the scene adds to our understanding of Maeve. We see her taking care of Danny (he’s twelve in this scene) in much the way a mother would: realizing something is wrong before pulling the story of the Brooklyn excursion out of him; buying the clothes and toothbrush he didn’t pack; carefully arranging the details for his train ride home (tipping a porter to seat him next to someone safe, arranging for their housekeeper to pick him up). We are also reminded of a backstory element revealed in chapter 2, that Maeve developed diabetes soon after her mother left. When they go to church on Good Friday, she has to leave the service to give herself insulin; she jokes to Danny that “people probably thought she was a junkie in a sweater set.” Her illness has been used as an excuse for the adults of the Dutch House not to talk about her mother around her. Taken together, these two elements paint the picture of a young woman who has at once too much responsibility and too little agency.

These elements of the story are delivered largely in summary (see, for example, the large orange chunk on page 11, which covers the two days Danny spends in New York after the visit to Brooklyn). It’s telling, but a condensed kind of telling that delivers a great deal of information recounting actions. Patchett also activates another layer of interest here because we are unsure just how much self-awareness our narrator (older Danny narrating from the standpoint of child Danny) has about the impact of Maeve’s nurturing, both on himself and her.

Finally, the scene adds to a key component of Danny’s character arc: He is more like his father than he (or Maeve) might want to admit, and yet his father is almost completely inaccessible to him. Patchett delivers a couple of these clues via dialogue lines, like Danny blurting out “Then she was crazy” when he learns that his mother hated the Dutch House. However these lines alone would not be enough to deliver the message Patchett wants us to get from the scene; we also need his introspective line, “There was no better house.” We need to be shown both the father’s advice that Danny stop thinking about his mother, and told, again via introspection and summary, that Danny has internalized and applied this advice.

One of the takeaways for me, then, from this analysis is that the familiar writing advice to show not tell does not always apply. If your scene objectives are largely retrospective and relational, introspection and summary may be the primary colors in your palette. However, you can layer in short bursts of showing—via action, dialogue, and setting—to make the scene feel dynamic. Another takeaway might be that telling can be more nuanced than it is often given credit for being.