I confess that I still haven’t got round to reading Ann Patchett’s best known book Bel Canto but her recent works, including the book of essays, These Precious Days, have really made me love her, demonstrating as they do, the work of a writer who is covering the subjects close to her heart as she covers characters who are older.
Life experience and how it shapes you feels to me to be the theme of Whistler, in the same way that I felt it was the theme of her previous novel Tom Lake.
Whistler opens with the narrator, Daphne and her husband Jonathan, walking around the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. Jonathan is about to leave to go and clear out his mother’s house after her death and the husband and wife are spending time together when they think they are being followed around the museum by an old man. The old man turns out to be Daphne’s long lost one-time stepfather Eddie Triplett, who was married to Daphne’s mother for a couple of years when the girls were young until an incident meant that the marriage broke up. The incident, and memories of it, are what drives much of the novel.
Eddie, it turns out, was loved by Daphne and her sister Leda, and his sudden departure was felt by both, so they are both keen to spend time with him again. And so the book is moved along by their meetings, with Daphne accompanying him to parties and being introduced as his daughter while they both feel their way back into the relationship. As we go, we start to find out more about why the divorce occurred and what happened one night when Eddie looked after Daphne.
I read this in two evenings and after the first half, I put it down and realised how much I liked all the characters and how strongly I didn’t anything bad to happen (or have happened) to them. They’re expertly written, the dialogue is believable and takes you straight into the scene, and they all have little faults and mannerisms that render them utterly real. It’s a book led by characters, the plot is secondary to just wanting to spend time in the room as they talk. The maturity and skill to write characters who are both flawed and likeable, who share precious days and work out how they got this far, is so much to be admired. Patchett offers so much that perhaps hasn’t been covered before – not just a female gaze but an older female gaze that’s been through the modern wringer of life. While she’s older than I am, there is much here that starts to make much more sense to me now than it would have done a few years back.
In case you were wondering about the title, Whistler is the name of the horse in a picture in Eddie’s study, and part of a story that he tells Daphne in the incident that defines their relationship.
This recently got panned in The Guardian as being saccharine and sentimental, but frankly I don’t care. There are so many books people have been talking about recently that have featured terrible incidents and all kinds of nastiness. Plus look at the world right now. It’s ok to have a respite and instead examine what it is that shaped us, long ago and why that’s still important. If this book is full of comfortably off white people, then yes, it may not work for everyone, but let’s not look for conflict and unpleasantness everywhere we go.
Whistler is a lovely book, full of warmth, all about the power of family relationships and the impact that life and love can have on us throughout. I loved it.
Whistler by Ann Patchett is published on 2 June, by Bloomsbury
Susan E Barsby 