Daphne Fuller, the protagonist of Ann Patchett’s newest novel is a fifty-three old English teacher at an all-girls private school. On a day trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with her older, retired husband, she runs into someone she hasn’t seen in over forty years: her former stepfather Eddie Triplett. They begin spending time together and it helps Daphne fill in some of the blanks from her childhood that have been puzzling her for years.
You see, Daphne has never fully understood the story of her mother’s divorce from the sweet-natured Eddie, a book editor who bonded with Daphne over their shared love of books and was just as loving to Daphne’s younger sister Leda. The official story from Daphne’s mother is that she decided she could no longer trust Eddie after a car accident when Daphne was nine, but that has never really made sense to Daphne.
As the full story slowly emerges, we also learn a little bit more about Daphne’s mother and the life she has built with her third husband, a man who made a fortune selling self-help books but is now embittered that his work is out of favor. We hear more about Daphne’s biological father, a ne’er-do-well lobsterman not suited to a life on land. We hear a lot about Daphne’s husband Jonathan and his Sisyphean effort to organize his dead mother’s home so he and his sister can sell it and move on. We briefly spend time with Leda and her son Henry, a perceptive boy who is the first to put together a crucial piece of the story.
It’s… kind of a lot to pack into a very slim novel. Too much, in fact. Whistler, a title derived from a story about a horse that Eddie tells Daphne in the aftermath of their accident, suffers from not giving enough characters enough time and space to make themselves known to readers. Even the main characters remain frustratingly distant, or inscrutable. Patchett is a practitioner of the big reveal, but too many of them in Whistler ring hollow. As a minor example, Daphne’s refusal to fly is a minor recurring storyline, a point of contention between her and her husband, but when the reason for her aversion comes out, it makes very little sense, at least to me. Similarly, Daphne’s mother, who is mostly a photocopy of “oblivious, self-centered mom” types from a million TV shows and movies, displays an aversion to hearing Daphne’s story of the car accident that is shocking and potentially a fruitful topic for psychological inquiry, but we don’t really get that from Patchett.
Whistler is mostly just a fairly nice story about fairly nice people trying their best, but readers looking for something complex or dramatic are probably better off looking elsewhere. The rapturous reviews for this novel are a little hard to understand.
