Whistler by Ann Pattchett: Doing what she does best

I was delighted to spot a new Ann Patchett in the publishing schedules, even more so when a proof dropped through my letterbox. Whistler begins with Daphne and her husband sharing a day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when he spots an elderly man who seems to be following her.

I hadn’t known there was something in me to break, but there it was and break it did. I stepped back into an open crack in time and fell backwards. 

Daphne and Jonathan have been married for two decades. Tomorrow, he will set off for Wisconsin to help his sister clear their mother’s house which has been in the family for generations. The dapper elderly man so interested in Daphne turns out to be her stepfather, the in between father before her publicist mother married one of her authors. Daphne adored Eddie, and he her, but she’s not seen him since the dramatic night when he drove into a tree on their way to see the stars, travelling back from visiting Daphne’s sister in hospital. Shortly afterwards, Eddie and Abigail divorced leaving nine-year-old Daphne to assume it was her fault. Now in her fifties, happily settled into adult life, Daphne wonders whether to pick up this long-buried relationship but can’t resist. Over the course of the next few days, with Jonathan reacquainting himself with his own childhood, Daphne and Eddie meet catching up on each other’s stories, filling in puzzling gaps and reminding each other of that night when Eddie told her the story he’d long wanted to publish to get them through the frigid night which could easily have ended badly for both of them.

I would gladly run all the way to Random House to throw my arms around his neck because somewhere deep inside myself, in a place inaccessible to me since I was nine, I had missed him every day of my life.  

Families come in many different shapes and sizes, something Patchett often celebrates in her novels with a perceptive empathy. Daphne and Leda, tellingly now a therapist, have spent their adult lives on the fringes of their mother’s new family, on affectionate if distant terms with their half-brothers. Eddie had seemed the ideal stepfather, loving, careful and interested but his time with Abigail had been brief, banished for what Daphne had assumed to be the accident but turns out to be more complicated than that. Many stories are told throughout the novel, relationships seen from different angles, interpretations of events subtly varied. The relationship between Daphne and Eddie is a delight, echoing, perhaps, Patchett’s own relationships with her fathers: there’s a lovely photograph in her essay collection, These Precious Days, which prefaces the piece, Three Fathers featuring all of them looking delighted with her. I loved this warm, intimate portrayal of family, the many layers of stories which make a life and the renewal of a loving bond, almost forgotten, but which had become a bedrock of Daphne’s life almost without her knowing it.

Bloomsbury Books: London ‎ 9781037205316 320 pages Hardback