Dr. Adriaan by Louis Couperus

Full house in Holland

Dr. Adriaan, published in 1903, is the fourth and final novel in the Books of the Small Souls series by Dutch author Louis Couperus, having been preceded by 1) Small Souls, 2) The Later Life, and 3) The Twilight of the Souls. This fourth installment takes place ten years after The Twilight of the Souls. Adriaan (Addie) van der Welcke, now 26, has realized his dream of becoming a physician. He is a general practitioner, which at the time included the treatment of various nervous disorders which are now under the domain of psychiatrists. In such cases, Addie has become known for his adept use of hypnotism as a treatment technique. He now has a wife, Mathilde, and two toddler children.

Addie and his family reside with his parents, Baron Henri van der Welcke and Constance (née van Lowe), who have inherited the Van der Welcke estate in Driebergen, a country town outside of the Hague. In the previous novel, Constance’s brother Gerrit van Lowe died, leaving behind a wife and nine children. Addie, who has always been mature beyond his years, has assumed the guardianship of this family, even though he is only six years older than the eldest of Gerrit’s children. They all live in the Driebergen mansion, as do elderly Mama van Lowe and a few cousins with various ailments whom Addie is treating for free. At one point in the book, I counted 19 residents in the Driebergen house, not counting servants, plus a few other relatives living nearby who show up for dinner almost every night. Addie’s wife Mathilde does not fit in with the Van Lowe family and resents the fact that she has to share her husband with his numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins. This causes problems in their marriage. Addie is happy living in Driebergen, generously offering his medical skills to the country poor, but Mathilde would prefer they move back to the Hague, where Addie can become a fashionable big-city doctor and grow a prosperous practice serving the urban wealthy.

The closest literary analogy I can make to Couperus’s Small Souls series is the Jalna novels by Canadian author Mazo de la Roche. Both feature a large family of distinct personalities whose lives revolve almost entirely around each other and their family dinners at Grandma’s house. The Jalna novels are a little prone to soap-opera melodrama, however, while the Small Souls books read more like real life. Dr. Adriaan doesn’t have many of the momentous or scandalous events one can frequently count on in family sagas: love affairs, deaths, crimes, divorces, etc. Instead, these small souls tend to live small quiet lives like most of us do. Couples question their relationships. Siblings quarrel. Young people try to find their direction in life. Aging people come to terms with old regrets and resign themselves to contentment. Some deal with pesky, non-fatal illnesses, both physical and mental. If this were the first novel in the series, such prosaic happenings might be too boring to be justified. Couperus, however, has developed these characters over the course of four volumes, so that the reader has come to know them, identify with them, feel for them, and become invested in their lives and struggles. Anyone who’s read the first three Small Souls novels will be thoroughly engaged from the first page of Dr. Adriaan.

Although Couperus could have kept this series going for at least another novel or two, he does conclude Dr. Adriaan with a touch of finality, and he never returned to the Van Lowe family. A naturalist in a similar mode as Emile Zola or Theodore Dreiser, Couperus enjoyed some popularity in English translation in the early 20th century, but I think it’s fair to say he has since largely been forgotten by American readers. That’s a shame, because he really is a very talented and accomplished novelist who deserves worldwide recognition, as evidenced by his compelling Books of the Small Souls.