Ann Patchett, Whistler (Bloomsbury 2026)
Before the meeting: This is a story about a web of relationships among middle class people in north-eastern USA. It starts when the narrator, 54 year old school-teacher Daphne Fuller, is wandering through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her hospital administrator husband, Jonathan (excellent name, correctly spelled) notices that an older man has been surreptitiously following them. They charge through gallery after gallery to shake him off, but he catches up and reveals that he is Eddie, Daphne’s stepfather. But her stepfather’s name is Lucas. Then in a flash she remembers that her mother married twice after her first marriage ended, and she has completely forgotten Eddie, her first stepfather.
She has forgotten him, but in his brief time in the father role, she loved him with a passion. As the novel unfolds we come to know Eddie as a universally loved book editor, we learn the story of his marriage to Daphne’s mother and, crucially, Daphne remembers and tells for the first time the story of a road accident in which she and Eddie were involved when she was nine years old and he was 32.
It’s an enjoyable read, with a smooth New York wit and a gallery of pleasantly interesting characters. I wasn’t bored but I found myself wondering if there was any point to it. Then, towards the end, Daphne happens on a moment of tenderness between two other characters:
I wondered what anyone ever knows about another person’s relationship.
Looking at these two men leaning against one another in the middle of the room like a couple of support beams, one of them too tired to even go and sit down, I realized the answer was nothing. I knew nothing at all.
I think that comes close to naming the book’s central theme. There are any number of relationships that are easy to sum up in a word or two. But look just a little bit closer and they are full of surprises. And, unlike in the familiar Long Day’s Journey kinto Night structure, it usually turns out that people are kinder, braver, more generous that they seem. Which may be exactly what many of us need in a book just now.
One little note: I wonder if anyone else found echoes of the children’s writing of William Steig in Eddie’s witty dialogue, and in particular of Brave Irene (link is to my blog post) in young Daphne’s blizzard adventure. Please say in the comments.
At the meeting: No one else was much interested in my Brave Irene reference, though in reflecting about our discussion I think it is to the point.
Generally people felt that the book stayed on the surface of characters. But as we talked, it emerged, at least in my mind, that there’s a lot going on that you could easily skim over – much in the way a child can read something like Brave Irene without worrying about any deep themes. For instance, when one person said she was unconvinced by Daphne’s mother’s break-up with Eddy we did a group effort of teasing out her motivations. Someone else raised the question of whether there was something sexual going on between the adult Eddie and child Daphne trapped overnight in a crashed car in the book’s main event: I don’t think so, though it was certainly intimate and bonding, but the question was there. Or again, Daphne loved Eddie when he was her stepfather, which surely has something to sdo with her marrying a man 15 years older than her – if so, the book doesn’t make a point of it, and no one cares. Then there’s the delicious irony, which again is there without signposting, that the only character who is thoroughly negative is a man who once made a fortune from a series of books promoting positivity. (The irony of his negativity as opposed his fame resting on positivity is explicit, but not the meta-irony that he is the book’s beacon of negativity.)
That is to say, I was onto something. I await the opinion of my children’s literature–savvy readers.
The Book Club always discusses two books. Our companion to Whistler was The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, about which I plan to blog tomorrow. A very different book.
We ate an excellent dinner of fish and kipfler potatoes, followed by a lemon delicious pudding cooked from a TinEats recipe. After our book discussion we did a little karaoke using our hostess’s new toy.
I read Whistler and wrote the first pat of this post on Wulgurukaba country, the beautiful island of Yunbenun. The Book Club’s five members, all of settler heritage, met on Gadigal land, and I wrote the rest of the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present of all those Nations who have cared for this country for millennia, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.
Me fail? I fly! 