Small Souls

Three generations of a Hague family close ranks when the eldest daughter comes home from Italy with the husband she ran off with thirty years ago. Nobody shouts; the punishment is administered entirely through calls, seating and silence. Couperus was raised partly in the Dutch East Indies and came back to a caste that could not forgive irregularity — this is the first of four novels in which he takes it apart from within. Fifty-five plates by painters from Constable to Mondrian follow the family's stifled world through trees, farmsteads and low skies, the flat Dutch landscape that keeps its own counsel.