While museums are among New York’s crown jewels, I revere one above all others: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which seemingly goes on forever, with entire wings devoted to Ming Dynasty scrolls, African sculpture and a stunning series of European galleries. Ann Patchett pivots off the Met in her subtle, spirited new novel Whistler, which follows one 53-year-old woman as she reckons with her half-forgotten childhood and considers parenthood in a fresh light.
Daphne Fuller, Patchett’s protagonist, lives with her husband Jonathan, a retired physician, in suburban Bronxville, N.Y. She teaches English to teenage girls at a private school. Her younger sister Leda, a psychologist and columnist for The New York Times, resides with her Korean American husband in a sprawling apartment on the Upper West Side. Two years apart, the sisters grew up in Boston, daughters of Abigail and Buddy Zabriskie, who’d divorced after Buddy decided he’d spend his best life as a fisherman, “sitting in a shed somewhere mending lobster traps, his phone long disconnected for nonpayment.” Abigail forged her own path; her aspirations led her into Boston’s vibrant publishing community in the 1970s, where she worked as a publicist at Houghton Mifflin before settling down with Lucas, a “positivity” guru, and raising an additional pair of sons.
But between these marriages there was an interlude and another husband: the cunningly named Eddie Triplett, odd man out in Abigail’s threesome of spouses. Daphne’s chance encounter with Eddie at the Met, some four decades and change after she’d last seen him, launches Whistler and compels Daphne toward a reconstitution of her relationship to her family — indeed, her understanding of family itself. An eminent editor at Random House still tending a stable of authors, Eddie conjures Daphne’s memories of his brief time (less than two years) as her stepfather. He was calm, capable and charming, devoted to Abigail and the girls. And they all loved him back. Perhaps surprising to Daphne (and Patchett), Eddie is the kind of man who can diagnose a sick child and cover meetings and drop-offs for his wife while maintaining his own high professional standards. He’s an excellent vehicle to scramble clichéd notions of both fatherhood and motherhood.
Together, Eddie and Daphne piece together their years of separation and the traumatic event that ripped them apart, rekindling their bond. The Triplett marriage had ended mysteriously in 1980, after Eddie and 9-year-old Daphne were injured in a car accident on the drive home from a hospital visit after Leda’s appendectomy. Repressed, the trauma now roars back, unleashing a Pandora’s box of deceptions.
This is vintage Patchett. She pins down a hinge moment, a before and after that alters a family. The divorce was swift, and Eddie was erased from their lives as Abigail’s daughters clung to happy memories, at least for a while. The author brings her honed scalpel to bear on hidden motives, shifting between Daphne’s perspective and a third-person account of the ordeal. Eddie had been trapped in the wreck, and Daphne wriggled free and then sought help. Patchett tips in flourishes — Eddie’s manic thoughts as the car pitches down a steep hillside, the ease with which man and child forge a strategy for survival, a myth of a horse named Whistler.
After they have reunited, Eddie sweeps the adult Daphne into an extension of a world she already knows: wedding soirées at New York’s prestigious Century Club, barhopping among glamorous hotels, hobnobbing with the city’s luminaries, real people thinly disguised — a Manhattan idealized in its celebration of elegance and affluence. Yet something gnaws at Daphne. A secret emerges, upending her sense of her past:
How was it that a weekday trip to a museum with my husband had plunged me back into childhood at the age of fifty-three? I knew what Leda would say. She would say it was because childhood never leaves us. We seal the room up and cover it in sheetrock. We dry and sand and paint, but the pocket of history remains, and sooner or later someone always winds up tapping on the wall, commenting on the way it sounds strangely hollow in there, and then the whole thing comes tumbling down.
And yet it only tightens the connection between Eddie and Daphne.
Whistler is Patchett in a lighter register, its tempo brisk as a short story’s. It’s a drama of manners, a nostalgic interpretation of what family looks like in a rarefied space far removed from soaring gasoline prices, populist anger and Trumpian rage. It’s also a lament for our vanishing literary culture. It may lack the narrative heft of The Dutch House and Bel Canto, but it scatters a similar fairy dust across its pages, delivering its pleasures with wit and panache.
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