Ann Patchett’s Whistler Is A Sweet Hymn To Familial Secrets

Ann Patchett opens her gossamer new novel, Whistler, with a startling encounter. The middle-aged Daphne runs into her stepfather, whom she hasn’t seen for forty years ever since her mother divorced him. The lead up to the reunion unfolds tentatively and with funny assumptions. Daphne is with her husband, Jonathan, at the Met, when he nudges her about an elderly man following them. He teases her, in his habitual way, about her landing a new admirer. She retreats whereas he advances into conversation with the man who turns out to be her stepfather, Eddie Triplett. It doesn’t take much for Eddie and Daphne to effortlessly pick up the conversation without a hitch.  

Eddie is still a literary editor while Daphne is now an English teacher. Her sister, Leda, is a clinical psychologist with a swanky flat. The two have always gotten along without envy or spite. It’s in her Daphne confides about their stepfather’s re-emergence. Quickly, Daphne and Eddie start going out. Their renewed closeness is as a reminder of what time has taken as a corresponding strand involving Jonathan. His mother has passed. He goes to his family home to pack away keepsakes before its sale. Just as he seems lost in deciding what to retain, ambushed by memories each object stirs, Daphne spirals into her nine-year-old-self.

A key episode that drove Eddie’s rupture from Daphne’s family gains centrality. It was the January of 1980. During a time when Leda was hospitalised for appendicitis, Eddie took a detour with Daphne for stargazing. Their car skidded off the road in the dense snow. Tactful thinking saved them. Pivotal to this memory is also a story which Eddie told her to keep up her spirits. It’s the tale of a Wyoming rancher who had a near-death experience. Thrown by her horse, Whistler, she was visited by late loved ones who urged her to hang on, muster strength before Whistler came back. This story was a book proposal Eddie had received which ultimately never materialised.

Patchett chooses to be kind where other writers would likely skewer, be cynical and dredge up hurt and trauma. There’s an open-heartedness in her writing, embracing how people could genuinely be empathetic if they opened up to each other without imagined hang-ups. She writes with a loving, forgiving eye about our mistakes, misjudgements, inadvertent flaws. Time is foregrounded with the capacity to bring closure, if we allow ourselves the grace. In all the years since Eddie exited their lives, Daphne barely ever recalled him. He grew fainter with each year until he was no longer remembered. His sudden return draws forth a gush of love, memories and tenderness. Nevertheless, Daphne doesn’t instantly welcome all that Eddie carries with him. She’s hesitant and unsure of the intimacy they can resume. There are latent anxieties Jonathan has about his wife being drawn to older men, but Patchett only winks at this. Is Daphne betraying her mother? Neither can she fathom why she defers getting her mother in loop. Does she fear the confrontation, the unease at a former relationship Abigail has long stashed away?

Patchett reflects the full sweep of private history through a suggestion, a glance. She achieves a fluidity wherein the past ripples into the present. They aren’t so much in disjunction as either speaks to the other. The extended flashback works a centring pull. The novel keeps switching between the defining memory and how its characters revisit and reconcile with all that they did sense as well as those shuffled away secrets. Patchett spins these into complex decades-long arrangements, mysteries and denials lovers and kindred folks live through.

Daphne marvels how she and her sister assembled their lives in the wake of their mother, Abigail’s several divorces. Patchett threads in a single epiphanic shard just as swiftly. Abigail gave her kids autonomy. She let them take their decisions, steer their lives without having to constantly answer to her or please her. The rare freedom in this enabled them to hone their trajectories without falling apart whenever Abigail shifted through phases. Patchett’s iridescent, gently flowing dialogues illuminate a sense of lightness in various relationships. There are no  vicious characters in Whistler. Daphne’s biological father, Buddy, stumbled into unwanted parental responsibility. A fisherman, he abandoned his wife to raise their kids alone. Even for this parent-child equation, Patchett weaves in no bitterness but a warm memory of Daphne indulging her absent father’s dream.

But there’s also a remove, like between Daphne and Abigail’s current husband, Lucas, who she has been with over twenty years. Daphne suggests her mother might have been too swept up in her younger sons with Lucas. Somewhere along, Daphne and Leda got sidelined.

Patchett never invests her characters with an arch or sharky edge. Whistler is filled with remarkably resilient people. Each might be hurting and confused in their little ways but they don’t grudge the other. They are resourceful, compassionate and wise enough to know when to offer a hand or some quiet space. It’s the dignity, myriad generosities Patchett’s characters present each other that infuses her work with soulful redemption. This good-naturedness might strike few readers as too sunny, glib and insincere. Patchett takes your hand and insists to believe, to trust.

Whistler keeps returning to the delicate territory of a buried past, probing especially whether digging it up does any good. This question has tailed Patchett’s work for years, from Commonwealth (2016) to her previous outing, Tom Lake (2023). For Daphne’s family, at least, it’s no less than an act of reconstruction grounded in utmost kindness. In typical Patchett vein of storytelling, there’s little ill will or resentments that tide over revelations. Slow, deliberate measures find the family healing over an episode they never quite discussed.

A latter musing in the novel indicates the emotional breadth of childhood experiences invisibly hanging over our lives: “She would say it was because childhood never leaves us. We seal the room up and cover it in sheetrock. We dry and sand and paint, but the pocket of history remains, and sooner or later someone always winds up tapping on the wall, commenting on the way it sounds strangely hollow in there, and then the whole thing comes tumbling down.” This observation forms the novel’s bedrock. The car accident swims up every now and then, dealt in parallel detail alongside the present-day reckonings. Patchett devotes ample time, attention and depth to every crawling, cherished minute in the wrecked car the two share. The accident serves paradoxical ends. It made Abigail oust Eddie from their lives. But it, which Daphne only later realises, bound the tether between Eddie and her even firmer. It became their special spark of connection. What might have been a profoundly upsetting childhood memory was upstaged by care and consolation he lent in the crisis. Inadvertently, Daphne internalises the heroic concern she experienced as her life’s pivot. Whistler is one of those snug little stories, modest and glowingly self-contained, you could tuck in forever.