Ann Patchett and the stories that rescue us

In “Whistler,” a chance encounter sends a woman back to the defining chapter of her childhood.

The Tuesday Review

(Harper)

Ann Patchett’s new novel, Whistler, is that loveliest of summer gifts, a story of reconciliation, of old affections renewed, of a family’s circumference enlarged. Fans of the author’s previous work will open these pages like an old shoebox of family photos. Newcomers — how I envy them those first moments — will discover a writer of gentle wit and quiet grace.

Whistler, Patchett’s 10th novel, may be her most essayistic and in that sense her most confident. This is a reflection on fatherhood largely unruffled by the exigencies of plot. You’ll wait in vain for the terror of Bel Canto or the thrills of State of Wonder. Yes, it contains a moment of real peril, but the sting of fear has been mellowed over time like onions caramelized by heat.

Whistler begins in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but unlike Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch, the explosion that takes place is merely a chance encounter that blows away four decades of separation. One day while strolling through Modern and Contemporary Paintings, Daphne and her husband become aware that an older gentleman is following her. She’s not particularly concerned. “If you don’t want to engage with someone, don’t engage,” she thinks, but her husband insists on introducing himself.

After a brief conversation, he brings the older man over and announces, “This is your stepfather.”

Daphne knows he must be wrong, but then the gentleman says his name — Eddie — and her eyes are opened.

“All of this transpired quietly; no one turned to watch life’s drama unpacked in the gallery,” Daphne says. “I bowed my head and covered my face. I hadn’t known there was something in me to break, but there it was and break it did. I stepped into an open crack in time and fell backwards.”

Eddie is one of those familial figures who defy categorization: When Daphne was 9, he was briefly her stepfather and much beloved. Indeed, she thought of the two of them as “inseparable.” But after her mother divorced him, Eddie became what exactly? — missed intensely for a year or two and then, inexplicably, forgotten. All she has left is a faint scar down the left side of her face.

When she asks him, “Do you remember —,” he immediately interrupts: “I remember everything.”

The intensity of their reunion in the museum rattles her in the best possible way and fuels the rest of Whistler, which is as much a story of fond remembrance as a study of family healing. Daphne, now 53, realizes with a start that she’s always held herself responsible for the divorce but never interrogated that childhood certainty, much to the chagrin of her sister, a clinical psychologist.

I asked Ann Patchett, “What most interested you about a childhood relationship that could feel both forgotten and unforgettable at the same time?”

What really happened to remove Eddie from their home so precipitously? Why did he never reach out over the years? Is it really possible that in some inaccessible place of her mind she’s missed him every day of her life?

The answers to those questions are buried in a traumatic experience that bound Eddie and Daphne together one winter day but then remained snowed under in memory. The careful work of uncovering what happened involves remembering something Eddie told her about a surreal adventure and a horse named Whistler. It’s an emblem not of their mutual love of horses — neither of them has ever set foot on a ranch — but of their mutual love of stories.

Both Eddie and Daphne once dreamed of becoming novelists but each ended up in adjacent careers: Eddie is a longtime editor at Random House; Daphne teaches literature at a girls’ prep school. They know from what they once endured together that great stories save lives.

But Patchett won’t let that sweet platitude sit in the sun and wither. Whistler is just as much a novel about the way stories erase lives. As Daphne and Eddie welcome each other back into their worlds, she realizes just how effectively her one-time stepfather has been participating in a fiction that keeps his real life hidden.

Let me drop two spoilers right here: The horse does not die, and Daphne is not repressing memories of sexual abuse. Instead, everything about this plot is operating on a daring level of subtlety and nuance. But that only puts more attention on the quality of Patchett’s dialogue, the way she captures on the page the erratic flight of witty banter or the tentative questions of a daughter prodding her mother for answers as though she’s checking for a bruise she doesn’t want to find.

Every character comes trailing their own gently comic peculiarities, including Daphne’s current stepfather, a self-help guru who’s too depressed to take his own advice. And there’s a scene set among preppy folks in Darien, Connecticut, that’s so good I practically choked on an olive pit.

Patchett’s fans will taste hints of autobiography — if not the ingredients then the spices — starting with the author’s own three fathers. But any echoes of real life matter less than what Patchett makes of them. Daphne’s journey through her past is cleverly reflected in the novel’s structure, which almost immediately sends her husband away to clean out his late mother’s house. So, while Daphne digs through her memories of that formative period with Eddie, her husband is emptying closets and cleaning up a garage, sifting through the detritus of his own youth.

Whistler, in other words, is a story that understands every family eventually inspires an act of uncertain excavation. “I wondered what anyone ever knows about another person’s relationship,” Daphne says. “I realized the answer was nothing.”

If for no other reason than the existence of novels like this, I think she’s wrong.◆

Whistler, by Ann Patchett (Harper, 304 pp. $30)

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