{"id":619,"date":"2026-06-02T12:51:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T12:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/06\/02\/whistler-by-ann-patchett-a-pacy-metafiction-where-rich-people-are-nice-to-each-other\/"},"modified":"2026-06-02T12:51:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T12:51:09","slug":"whistler-by-ann-patchett-a-pacy-metafiction-where-rich-people-are-nice-to-each-other","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/06\/02\/whistler-by-ann-patchett-a-pacy-metafiction-where-rich-people-are-nice-to-each-other\/","title":{"rendered":"Whistler by Ann Patchett: a pacy metafiction where rich people are nice to each other"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Ann Patchett\u2019s 11th novel Whistler, a former stepfather and stepdaughter, Eddie and Daphne, meet again by chance after 44 years. They rekindle their bond (before long, Eddie is introducing Daphne as \u201cmy daughter\u201d) and revisit the events that prompted Eddie\u2019s abrupt departure from her life when she was nine.<\/p>\n

Eddie is a fiction editor beloved by everyone \u2013 his name \u201ca bass note called again and again\u201d. Daphne is a private school English teacher \u201csafely past 50\u201d, who describes her post-Eddie childhood as a period of \u201cestrangement\u201d. Both had (unrealised) ambitions to be novelists.<\/p>\n

We meet them in the present, in New York\u2019s Met Museum on a spring day, and leave them in their past, \u201chand in hand\u201d in an ambulance, in Massachusetts in the snow.<\/p>\n

Their reunion brings together a handful of wealthy, white-collar, middle-aged and elderly people who are related either by blood, marriage or former marriage. They all reflect, gently, on their lives and relationships. Forgotten family stories are brought tenderly into the light. <\/p>\n

There are characters called Trip and Buddy and Candy and Dr Ocean. Despite broken marriages, closeted sexuality and at least one long-term affair, everyone gets along pretty well. <\/p>\n

They visit each other\u2019s homes, eat brunch, and occasionally drink slightly too much. They give each other lifts, and take each other to hospital appointments. They bring each other glasses of water, and offer up the guest room. They are forgiving of each other: <\/p>\n

\n

I remembered she was a person who had lived her own autonomous life full of mistakes and disappointments and judgements and thwarted love. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The novel\u2019s characters are thoughtful about the past and how to approach it. \u201cLet me know when I cross the line,\u201d Daphne says to Eddie, as they probe the origins of the lifelong affair he has had with his married best friend. <\/p>\n

Despite occasional gestures to interpersonal conflicts, everyone is just quite nice to each other. Patchett\u2019s gathering cliches to describe these disputes (the odd \u201cwhiff of betrayal\u201d or knowledge of \u201csomething fishy going on\u201d) undermine any tension.<\/p>\n

Eddie is gay. This is the reason Daphne\u2019s mother divorced him \u2013 but there\u2019s no bad blood between them. Their reunion is oddly affectless, as described by Daphne: <\/p>\n

\n

\u201cLook at you,\u201d Eddie said when we came through the door. He went right to our mother, took her in his arms. \u201cLook at my beautiful ex-wife.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Whistler<\/a> is full of doomed marriages \u2013 deaths, divorces and stepparents abound \u2013 but none are framed as tragic or traumatising. Rather, the lingering dead \u2013 a roguish father; a wife whose main character trait is collecting rabbit paintings; even a curmudgeonly stepfather whose contribution to American letters is a book series called Positivity! \u2013 are spoken of with warmth by those whose new unions their deaths have occasioned. <\/p>\n

The dissolution of parental relationships and the formation of new ones are received by turns with delight, equanimity or, at worst, indifference. <\/p>\n

Health crises \u2013 a car accident, a fall from a horse, appendicitis, leukemia \u2013 are not catastrophes. Rather, they occur in the context of high-quality healthcare (\u201cEvery patient had their own pod with frosted-glass dividers and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city\u201d) and bring characters together in service of the novel\u2019s central theme: the endurance of familial love, in its multifaceted iterations.<\/p>\n

Whistler is a chestnut mare, and the central figure in an unwritten book-within-the-book that editor Eddie \u201ctried for years\u201d to acquire.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a slightly hokey parable about a near-death experience that reads like a pitch for a Mitch Albom (Tuesdays with Morrie) novel. Stranded on a remote hillside, \u201cbadly hurt and alone\u201d, Whistler\u2019s rider is benignly visited by her dead dog, son, father and best friend, before the horse returns to save her life.<\/p>\n

Like several of Whistler\u2019s key plot points (a broken ankle; the protagonists\u2019 novelistic ambitions; a sister who is a therapist and can therefore unpack any narrative complexities the reader may have overlooked), Patchett offers this story knowingly. Whistler is a novel that knows it\u2019s a novel. <\/p>\n

Its metafictionality is sometimes subtle, but it collapses under its own weight in the closing pages, when Eddie suggests that Daphne write \u201cit all down\u201d. In the proposed book, Eddie, who has leukemia, suggests: \u201cI don\u2019t die. In the book, we\u2019re sitting on this bench, talking about a book about the two of us, and then the story stops.\u201d Reading this felt like learning it had all been a dream.<\/p>\n

Whistler reminded me of William Stafford\u2019s poem The Magic Mountain<\/a>, which begins:<\/p>\n

\n

A book opens. People come out, bend
\nthis way and talk, ponder, love, wander around
\nwhile pages turn. Where did the plot go? <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And yet, there is something compelling about it. Whistler is even, strangely, a pacy read, partly because it\u2019s heavy on dialogue. It doesn\u2019t always work \u2013 Patchett\u2019s prose is placid, and there is a lot of exposition.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s interesting to read a novel that so relentlessly engages the idea of niceness, especially among the kind of wealthy people \u2013 people who own boats or live in apartments with doormen \u2013 who are more often found, in literary and popular fiction, stabbing each other in the back. As Eddie says to nine-year-old Daphne: \u201cI swear to you, it\u2019s mostly good people out there.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Rona Cran does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Ann Patchett\u2019s 11th novel Whistler, a former stepfather and stepdaughter, Eddie and Daphne, meet again by chance after 44 years. They rekindle their bond (before long, Eddie is introducing Daphne as \u201cmy daughter\u201d) and revisit the events that prompted Eddie\u2019s abrupt departure from her life when she was nine. Eddie is a fiction editor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}