A riveting reunion

A winter car accident, childhood abandonment, grave illness and broken hearts are all central to Ann Patchett’s latest novel, but Whistler is far from a sad and depressing work of fiction. It is, rather, a lovely and engaging novel about decent, well-meaning people, the art of forgiveness and the embrace of family.

A resident of Nashville, Tenn., Patchett is the author of nine other novels, including Bel Canto (winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction), the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Dutch House and the COVID-set Tom Lake.

Like that last work of fiction, Whistler is set in the 2020s and is narrated by a strong, independent woman with much to be grateful for. It is not, contrary to its cover design and the fact that it is named for a horse, a novel about a horse.

Middle-aged Daphne Fuller is a happily married private school English teacher living in Bronxville, N.Y. who has managed to keep some confusing and painful childhood memories at bay simply by not thinking about them.

“For me the past was a sinkhole,” she tells her husband, Jonathan. “Not that it was terrible, but there was nothing for me there.”

That determination to not think about the past changes abruptly when, while strolling through the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Daphne and Jonathan bump into Eddie Triplett, the man her mother was married to for a brief time when Daphne was nine.

“How was it that a weekday trip to a museum with my husband had plunged me back into childhood at the age of fifty-three?” Daphne wonders.

Eddie himself was never the source of Daphne’s bad memories; he had adored his stepdaughter, and she had adored him in return. As Patchett slowly reveals, however, it was his sudden disappearance from Daphne’s life, not his presence in it, that had fuelled much of her disdain for her past. She had long blamed herself for his moving out and away, and is thrilled to welcome him back into her life after so many years.

That welcoming back includes reintroducing him to her sister and mother, reminiscing with him about the good times that they enjoyed and rehashing with him the details of the life-altering trauma that they shared.

In return, a gentle and appreciative Eddie introduces Daphne to his publishing house colleagues and his closest friends, his old college roommate Skip and Skip’s wife of 50 years, Polly, whose relationships with Eddie are not quite what they seem.

Patchett animates all of these characters, and all of their intertwined relationships, with a few choice, direct and descriptive words. No one in this novel is a cardboard cutout — they are all real, flawed human beings who are well aware of and enjoy both their wealth and their privilege, despite also being well aware of “all the fires in the world.”

They have made mistakes, sought forgiveness and told one another stories, both true and fabricated, to help manage both their own and their family and friends’ feelings and fears.

Those entanglements are all critical to the narrative, but it is the gentle, loving dynamic between Daphne and Eddie that propels this novel forward and keeps readers guessing about what is to come.

“Our hearts were forever stitched together, mine and Eddie’s,” Daphne says, and Patchett demonstrates exactly why that is so.

Whistler is a story about love and generosity of emotion. It is about letting people in instead of shutting them out, and giving them the benefit of the doubt. It is a nice story about generally nice people, and one that will certainly remind readers why, in 2021, Patchett received the U.S. National Humanities Medal for “putting into words the beauty, pain, and complexity of human nature.”

Sharon Chisvin is a Winnipeg writer, editor and oral historian.