‘Whistler’ by Ann Patchett: A luminous story of loving the family beyond one’s capacity

Ann Patchett’s Whistler opens with its protagonist, 53-year-old Daphne Zabriskie, running into her former stepfather on a random Friday. It’s a loaded encounter. Daphne bursts into tears, and Eddie Triplett – the stepfather in question – decides he needs a drink before noon. But it means that over 40 years later, their lives are connected again – a reality that they spend the rest of the time settling into.

Eddie is one of three fathers to Daphne and her sister, Leda: their late biological father left them to live on his sailboat full-time, and their mother’s current husband is cordial but has a family of his own. Eddie is the brief but joyous interlude between those two. Joyous, because he was deeply involved in parenting the girls (who were then nine and seven, and lived with him), and brief, because their mother divorced him and forbade any contact after he and Daphne nearly died in a car accident.

The past is a room

To talk about such a story, let us first address what it is not. As much as Whistler deals with wounds, it is not a tale of “healing”, which is to say, the characters do not wish to explain their experiences, and they do not describe their fractured backgrounds as things to pity or improve on – a belief which can translate to cloying sentimentality, or its worse cousin, therapy-speak. (This would’ve been easy to include, considering Leda is a therapist; and so we must be doubly grateful for its omission.)

They cry a lot. They talk about the past even more – their own and the past in the abstract, as a “room that we can seal up…(only for) someone to come tapping on the wall and commenting on how it sounds strangely hollow in there.” They answer long-held questions about their childhood and are confronted with new ones, trusting that any loose ends will be tied up when the time comes. In fact, they don’t care whether the time comes at all. The years and their exceedingly warm dispositions have made the world a friendly place, regardless.

In this state of not-healing lies the novel’s greatest victory: it makes us believe in people, in all our flawed glory. To heal, in Whistler’s world, is to hang out, crash weddings, stay up late to welcome family home, attend brunches and hospital appointments without feeling fully prepared for either, and make space for your loved ones to do what they’ve always wanted. Most of all, to heal is to tell stories.

The novel’s title comes from a story that Eddie tells Daphne during their accident. Their car is sideways on a snowy, deserted road in the middle of the night, and Eddie’s ankle is broken from the impact; ever the workaholic, all he can think of to allay their fears is a book proposal his publishing firm received earlier in the day. It is a memoir of a woman named Mary who also survived a near-death experience – cold, injured, alone, too much like their own circumstances for comfort – and was miraculously saved by her horse, Whistler. In the time before Whistler’s arrival, in the space between life and death, all the people Mary has lost appear by her side. Imagining their conversations is what gets Daphne and Eddie through the night.

Telling stories with love

It checks out, then, that Daphne grows up to like stories: she is an English teacher, and refuses to retire despite living with a husband who treasures life in retirement. This is another thing she discovers she has in common with Eddie – he still sits at his editorial desk – but it is perhaps the least remarkable discovery she makes about him. As they spend more time together, she learns the story of his divorce from her mother, which had far less to do with their accident than she thought. This is a shock, as one would expect, but it is also a sigh of relief, as she realises just how much she had blamed herself for her only strong father figure disappearing from their lives.

Whistler is somewhat autobiographical, as are Patchett’s preoccupations with family. She herself has had three fathers (she writes beautifully about it in a New Yorker essay), but none of them can be directly mapped onto the fathers in the novel. Her characters develop their own personhoods, their own wonderfully multidimensional relationships.

I spent a lot of time asking myself what I’d do in Daphne’s situation. Would I resent having these secrets kept from me? Probably. Would I be able to keep going with as much grace as she did? Probably not. But Daphne’s capacity to love is the luminous core of the novel, and it is contagious. Her mother’s marriages may have given her a tumultuous childhood, but when she thinks of her mother now, she thinks of a sharp conversation partner, someone who reacts strongly when she cannot, and who will never judge what she says when she’s hurt. She accepts that her father would never have given her the childhood she wanted – she is genuinely happy knowing he was better off on his boat and that Eddie entered her life when he did. And she makes every effort to be a good daughter to Eddie when he returns, even after being surprised by his past.

As I witnessed these moments in Daphne and Eddie’s lives, I had the intense urge to tell the people in my own life how much I love them. This is perhaps the simplest takeaway from any story, which is why it’s impressive that Whistler drives it home with such force: it is a reminder of what storytelling is capable of, and why we do anything at all.

The Whistler, Ann Patchett, Bloomsbury.