'Whistler' book review: Ann Patchett's new novel meanders

Ann Patchett can tell a story. The Pulitzer Prize finalist has proven that countless times through fiction (Tom Lake, a reimagining of Our Town), nonfiction (Truth & Beauty, a gorgeous chronicle of the author’s friendship with the late Lucy Grealy), or both (Bel Canto, an imagined look inside a real-life hostage situation).

Her latest novel, Whistler, tries very hard but reads more like a scattered first draft than the complex family story it aspires to be.

The night that changed everything

Whistler’s title refers to a horse that, decades ago, saved its owner from certain death. Over the course of one night in 1980, Eddie Triplett tells the story of Whistler to his young stepdaughter Daphne as they await help in the aftermath of a car accident. Daphne’s mother divorces Eddie soon after, and Eddie disappears from their lives.

Decades later, an elderly Eddie reconnects with Daphne, now a middle-aged high school English teacher, after a chance meeting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Eddie, now living with leukemia, is gay and has had a lifelong affair with his college friend Skip, who’s been married for decades.

The rekindling of a unique relationship like Eddie and Daphne’s—two people changed forever by their brief connection—could make for a fascinating narrative. Instead, their voices meander.

Daphne was raised by a tough-as-nails single mother who taught her daughter independence from the womb. But at some point, she transitioned from dreaming of writing books in the city to teaching classics in the suburbs.

Eddie, by contrast, was an out gay man in 1980s New York City, with a closeted, married lover. Now elderly, chronically ill, and mostly alone, he subsists on the crumbs of Sunday dinners with Skip and his wife, who may have known about their affair all along.

Rather than delving into these details, the nuances of their separate lives, and how their individual evolutions affect their present relationship, Patchett largely forgoes the color and detail that make up Daphne and Eddie, in favor of meandering dialogue and yet another mention of the mythological horse.

Whistler promises a simple story of reconnection that grows increasingly complex the more that is revealed to the reader. Instead, despite Daphne and Eddie’s family dynamics (and are they actually family anymore?) and the harrowing car accident that shaped both of them for better and for worse, the novel doesn’t seem to go anywhere, mostly because its two protagonists have strangely underdeveloped inner lives.

Somehow the horse is the most fully realized character in the book.