What a handy thing it is to take a piece of the past, wrap it up in a box, and stow it away on a high shelf in the back of your closet. You don’t use that shelf very often, and while you never forget that the box is there, as long as it stays shut, you can fool yourself into thinking that it can’t mess with you anymore.
The only problem, as any human knows, is that it can continue to shape your life.
Such is the case for Daphne Fuller, the narrator of Ann Patchett’s latest novel Whistler.
A high school English teacher in Bronxville, New York, Daphne has a complicated family story. Like Patchett herself, she is married to a significantly older man who works in a hospital. Also like Patchett, she has a father who was divorced from her mother, and not one but two stepfathers.
Daphne deeply loved her first stepfather, Eddie, although he was only in her life for a little over a year. “I believed that we were inseparable,” Daphne says. “We’d always liked each other hugely.” When Daphne’s mother divorces Eddie, she leads Daphne to believe it was to keep her safe. “That was the truth I carried with me,” Daphne confesses, “I chewed it up and swallowed it without examination. I was nine. My heart exploded with the blow.” And that is the box that sat in the closet until Daphne was in her mid-fifties, when Eddie reappeared in Daphne’s life. The box comes off the shelf.
Patchett excels in depicting ordinary, imperfect people whom we find ourselves rooting for. Daphne struggles to reconcile what she believed was the truth with what she now knows to be true. She must try to understand her deceptive mother, who has a new husband, a newer pair of children, and seems to have left Daphne and her sister in the past. “She decided the past was happy and so she has no reason to think about it,” Daphne’s sister Leda tells her. When Daphne asks where they fit into this narrative, Leda concedes, “We don’t.”
Ouch.
Daphne is a good person. In spite of being deeply conflicted, she wants to understand her mother. She and Leda, a therapist, review their own versions of the past as they search for what is true. As they realize they have different memories and experiences, Daphne acknowledges that must also be true for her mother, and it eases her sense of betrayal: “…for the first time in a long time, I remembered that I loved her, or more precisely, I remembered she was a person who had lived her own autonomous life full of mistakes and disappointments and judgements and thwarted love.” Her ability to see her mother this way is one of the hallmarks of Patchett’s writing. Her characters are thoughtful, intelligent people doing the best they can while not always understanding how to move forward.
Daphne plunges headfirst into renewing her relationship with Eddie. Her unbounded joy is tempered not only by worrying how her mother will react, but also by her husband’s comical and transitory fear that she might leave him for Eddie. And in this development, Patchett again uncovers the universal layers of insecurity, certainty, deception, anger, and affection that comprise most of our lifelong relationships with those we love–or try to love.
Through Daphne, Leda, their mother, Eddie, and others, we end up recognizing how worthwhile it is to do the work of empathy, connection, and forgiveness even when a perfect outcome is not guaranteed. One of the most beautiful moments in the novel is near the end, when Daphne understands that Eddie’s “case for human decency had informed my life. I believed him, and by believing him, I had found it to be true.” Whistler is the kind of novel you want to come back to, to make you feel better about being human.
