Few contemporary writers are as adept as Ann Patchett at opening a novel. Her first chapters are alluring invitations, intriguing introductions. Bel Canto (2001) starts with a bang: In an unnamed South American country, a grand party is thrown in honor of the president of an electronics company, but after a renowned soprano has finished bewitching the guests, a group of terrorists gatecrash and take everyone hostage. And The Dutch House (2019) begins with a mystery: Danny Conroy harks back to his childhood family home in small-town Pennsylvania, and the day his father introduced him and his sister Maeve to Andrea, the new woman in his life. The chapter concludes with Patchett fast-forwarding through the years and showing Danny and Maeve outside that home, looking in at Andrea and her daughters. What reversal of fortune has led to their banishment — and Andrea becoming queen of the castle?
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Patchett’s new novel — her 10th — entices us in with a blast from the past. Daphne Fuller, a 53-year-old English teacher, visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with her husband, Jonathan. He notices that an older man has been following them. Instead of finding cause for alarm, he makes light of it, reminding her that “old guys can’t get enough of you” and asking if she has a jealous lover. Daphne is curious but at the same time reluctant to confront the stranger. After Jonathan approaches him, she is stunned to learn that the man is not a stranger but rather Eddie Triplett, the former stepfather she hasn’t seen for 44 years. “I stepped into an open crack in time,” Daphne informs us, “and fell backwards.”
The pair catches up, which gives Patchett the opportunity to outline both present situations and backstories. We learn that Daphne’s father, Buddy Zabriskie, abandoned her, her younger sister, Leda, and their mother, Abigail, for a life at sea. Then Abigail, a publicist, and Eddie, an editor, forged a closer connection at work and eventually got married. “Eddie didn’t get much of a run,” Daphne tells Jonathan. “A year, possibly two years start to finish. Leda and I were crazy about him, but when he was gone, he was gone.” Abigail married again and had two sons with her current husband, Lucas Ekker, an author who also happens to be, in Eddie’s opinion, “a pontificating bore of a man.” Daphne reveals that when this “third candidate for fatherhood” arrived on the scene, it marked not so much a new beginning but a closed chapter. “I couldn’t say exactly where childhood ends, but dealing with your pregnant mother at the age of thirteen was as good a place as any to wrap it up.”
Patchett brings her opening section to a close by tantalizing us with the bare bones of a pivotal event. When Daphne was nine, she and Eddie were involved in a car accident. Almost immediately after it, Abigail filed for divorce, and in doing so, cut Eddie out of Daphne’s life. Daphne has never spoken at length about the accident, not even to Jonathan — “Deep dives into childhood trauma sort of ruins it everyone” — but after reuniting with Eddie, she finds herself finally opening up to her sister, a clinical psychologist.
From here, the novel unfolds on two alternating timelines. One continues in the present after the initial reunion and tracks Daphne as she forms a tight bond with Eddie again. Now 76, he has yet to retire from his job at Random House but still makes time to meet and reconnect with Daphne. She is afflicted with pangs of guilt for not telling Jonathan about her social engagements with Eddie — engagements that are entirely innocuous — but maintains there is method in her madness: “Whatever happened between me and Eddie this time around needed to be between the two of us.” They go to a golden anniversary dinner, gatecrash a wedding, and dine out. He takes pleasure in introducing her to people as his daughter — “of the long-lost variety.” On one occasion, he explains the real reason why Abigail abruptly called it quits on their marriage, and his disclosure reframes everything and prompts Daphne to see him, her relationship to him, and his relationship to others in a whole new light.
Patchett’s other narrative thread weaves back to 1980 and that fateful, near-fatal car accident. On a freezing January night in Winchester, Massachusetts, Eddie and Daphne drive out on a madcap excursion to pick raspberries in the dark. When Eddie loses control of the wheel, his car veers off the road and off a cliff. What follows, in several flashbacks, is an account of their battle for survival and a story about a horse called Whistler.
The novel will put some readers in mind of Patchett’s 2020 New Yorker essay “My Three Fathers,” in which she ruminated on her own trio of father figures. Daphne is just as eager to reflect, and goes off on enjoyable tangents to describe both the time she spent with her biological father during his dying days and the dislocation she felt when her second stepfather appeared and attempted to inculcate the power of positive thinking in the family.
But it is Daphne’s relationship with her first stepfather, Eddie, that motivates her and drives the novel. When Patchett cuts to 1980, we see how young Daphne is in awe of Eddie. He is kind and funny. He brings her books and reads with her, and he does crossword puzzles, leaving the easiest answers blank for her to fill in. When he smokes, Daphne and Leda are filled with horror “because they loved him and wanted him to live.” Patchett skillfully shows how their friendship is strengthened when they are trapped in his wrecked station wagon. That skill is on display again in the present-day scenes as the characters rekindle what they once had while making up for lost time and getting to know each other more fully.
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Patchett takes a creative gamble by divulging a key secret a third of the way through the proceedings. She takes an even bigger risk with one of the fulcrums of her plot. “Our hearts were forever stitched together, mine and Eddie’s,” Daphne announces in a rare treacly moment. Yet elsewhere she asks herself a stark question: “How had we forgotten about Eddie?” How indeed. He may only have been in Daphne’s life for a short time, but he clearly made an impact. Patchett forces us to suspend disbelief and merely accept the fact that Daphne cast this formative figure into oblivion and made no effort later to track him down.
In every other respect, though, Patchett triumphs. From its startling opening onward, Whistler is an enthralling novel. Its two leads are sharply rendered. Patchett deftly explores fractured families and secret lives, reconciliation and reinterpretation, all the time illuminating the hazards involved in committing to someone. Daphne’s mother is painfully aware of this. “It’s an awful business,” she says at one point. “Loving another person.”
Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.
