While strolling in the Metropolitan Museum of Art one day, Jonathan, Daphne’s husband, tells her there’s a man who seems to be following them through the various galleries. Some back and forth between the couple ensues—she disbelieving, he appalled by her utter lack of curiosity about the lurking stranger. Jonathan walks over to the man with white hair and a pink shirt and makes a startling discovery—the elderly man is, in fact, Eddie Triplett, Daphne’s stepfather, whom she hasn’t seen in over four decades. Or more accurately, her former stepfather, her mother having remarried again after divorcing Eddie.
In Whistler, Ann Patchett’s 10th novel, Eddie’s re-entry into Daphne’s life sets of a chain of…not events, per se, but more like a relook at past events and rediscovery of an affection that seems to have had an indelible place in both their lives. Gaps in knowledge are filled, blurry-edged memories get a more solid form, and new rituals are established.
At the centre of it all is a car accident involving Daphne and Eddie, when Daphne was just nine and Eddie was still married to Abigail, Daphne’s mother. While their respective recollections of the night overlap, the consequences of the event proved far-reaching for each in different ways.
As readers, we’re accustomed to waiting for the other shoe to drop. The highs are only as high as the lows are low. For a minute in the beginning, Jonathan seems apprehensive of Daphne and Eddie’s reunion. “I want to be sure you’ll be here when I get back,” he tells Daphne right before he’s about to leave for Wisconsin to pack up his dead mom’s house. Daphne’s reminder that Eddie is her stepfather doesn’t offer him much solace.
A long-standing point of contention between Jonathan and Daphne is her refusal to fly. “For as long as you’ve known me, I’ve been a non-flying schoolteacher,” Daphne counters. “I want to go to Fiji… I want to see the Milford Sound,” Jonathan throws back in a rare display of petulance.
Other than that, every difficult time, every moment of despair, is reframed as a source of something good. Jonathan’s apprehensions fall by the wayside soon enough. When Daphne and her sister Leda discuss their childhood, Leda, a therapist by profession, frames parental neglect as the reason behind their solidity as adults: “We were loved, not passionately but enough, and we were largely ignored, which allowed for our healthy separation from the primary family. Necessity made us resourceful and brave.” The illness of her father, Buddy, leads to Daphne meeting gentle, caring, curious Jonathan, the hospital administrator. Buddy’s illness also provides an opportunity for him and Daphne to bond in his last days. Candy, Jonathan’s late wife, lives on through her “first-rate” collection of rabbit paintings. When Lucas, Abigail’s husband, is found dead in the backyard and not discovered till hours later, Eddie remarks, “Still, that’s a nice death.” Daphne and Eddie take off right where they left off almost 45 years ago—he remembers her favourite song and where they went for sandwiches. She rants about students using AI to write papers but quickly clarifies she won’t retire as long as “girls get drunk at weddings and talk about Madame Bovary”.
There’s a glass-half-full optimism to everything; the worst thing that you could imagine with an elderly character battling sickness happens in an assumed future. The children are wise, the step siblings cordial (though, there’s a bitter stepdad—not Eddie—who once found great success in a series of books centred around positivity: Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook…).
The titular Whistler is the name of a horse who comes back for the rancher who fell of the horse’s back and lay immobile in a field during a storm; as a books editor, Eddie had been trying to get the woman to tell her story but without success. Who does Whistler represent in Daphne’s life then? Is it the nine-year-old girl who saved her stepfather’s life? Or is it Eddie who comes back from oblivion to provide Daphne a different perspective on her own world?
The release of an Ann Patchett novel is an important event on the literary calendar, which is justified since we’re talking about the writer of The Patron Saint of Liars, Bel Canto, and other acclaimed works. To say that everything and everyone in the world of Whistler is too nice is not a criticism. In an era where even romance novels come with a classic third-act breakup, Whistler’s biggest achievement probably lies in how it seems to envelope us, the readers, and its characters in a warm fleece on a cold winter’s night. And some days, that’s okay.
Whistler by Ann Patchett is published by Bloomsbury; ₹699
