WHISTLER, by Ann Patchett
The opening to “Whistler,” Ann Patchett’s 10th novel, could sound creepy, even Hitchcockian: A couple realize they are being followed by a male stranger in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It’s the 70-year-old husband, Jonathan, who sees him first: “Old guy,” he whispers to his wife, 53-year-old Daphne, “near the exit sign.” Apparently this fellow has been trailing them from the ticket line through Medieval Art, and now into the American Wing. He can’t seem to take his eyes off Daphne.
She hasn’t noticed him herself, and doesn’t share Jonathan’s curiosity, so he goes off to solve the mystery alone. She is meanwhile captivated by Charles Ray’s “Two Horses,” a large granite relief of, in Daphne’s interpretation, “one horse and its ghost,” a faint animal standing behind the clearer one like a shadow, or an echo. This sculpture appears to encompass past and present all at once; Patchett’s story will deftly do the same.
After a while, when Jonathan doesn’t return, Daphne finds him chatting away with a dapper stranger with significant eyebrows in another gallery. Soon her husband is proudly reintroducing Daphne to his new friend as her very own stepfather. She is confused; this is not the man her thrice-married mother has been living with for the last four decades.
“Keep going back,” Jonathan says. “One more stepfather.”
The shy stalker (“I’m sorry,” he says, “I didn’t mean to chase you”) is Eddie Triplett, a book editor who is not at all the sort of caddish or abusive stepfather we sometimes find in literature and film. Eddie is more of a manic pixie dream stepdad, albeit one who nearly killed them both in a car accident when Daphne was 9.
He was driving her to stargaze on a raspberry farm near their home in the Boston suburbs one winter night when their car slipped off a cliff. Daphne’s mother sent him packing after a scant year of marriage, and that had been that. Daphne felt guilty the way many children do when things go wrong in their family, and as recognition finally hits her now, 40 years later, she bursts into tears.
Eddie utters his old pet name for her, Duck, “his voice full of sorrow,” and Daphne feels as if “I stepped into an open crack in time and fell backward.” Not until this chance reunion does she realize how much she still cared for and missed him. Though their interlude as official relatives was cut short, “our hearts were stitched together forever,” Daphne thinks.
And so begins a modern family’s platonic, later-in-life love story, in which a stepfather and stepdaughter resume their profound, if suspended, attachment. As foreshadowed by the “Two Horses” painting, Patchett contours their magical connection in the present with the specter of their past, revealing the details of the accident and its aftermath both in the characters’ recollections and in narrative flashbacks.
As the younger versions of themselves hang broken and sideways in her mother’s overturned car, Eddie overcomes his own agonizing pain and fear to protect the little girl from hers. He keeps the situation light with his affable wit, comforting and distracting her with conversations about writing and about a book proposal he read at work that day in which a horse named Whistler helps his owner realize that love can defy death. The story gives Daphne the courage she will need to face the rest of that hard night, and what comes after.
Now, as the two fill in the blanks of their estrangement over the ensuing weeks and then months with whispered asides, heartfelt admissions and a shared sense of humor, they find they are very much the same people they were all those years ago. He is still hilarious and brilliant and courtly, and puts Daphne’s feelings first (unlike Jonathan, a widower who had his hands full with two children when she met him). She remains as empathetic, resilient and hungry for adventure as she was at 9.
And so they slip back easily and eagerly into the roles of parent and (adult) child. Eddie takes her to a stodgy anniversary party where he delights her by introducing her as his daughter to his bewildered friends — he never remarried or had children of his own. They escape to the Plaza Hotel for drinks and inadvertently crash a wedding. Wherever they go, Eddie is the life of the party. (Everyone in Daphne’s life adores him: her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist who’s held Daphne’s hand since childhood; the sometimes-jealous Jonathan; and even Daphne’s withholding mother herself.)
Is there a place in serious literature for kind, happy characters and kind, happy stories? This intimate and entertaining novel makes the strong case that there is; as demonstrated across her work, such sturdiness of spirit is part of Patchett’s generous worldview.
While I have never met people quite this sparkly myself, Patchett gives Daphne and Eddie real lives filled with all of the human mess real people endure: trauma and loss, secrets, lies, illness. The “old guy” in the Met turns out to be the furthest thing from creepy: He is her soul mate, and she his; and their reconnection adds both depth and buoyancy to their waning days together.
WHISTLER | By Ann Patchett | Harper | 295 pp. | $30