Ann Patchett’s book of transgressions

It is called the inciting incident, the mechanism that winds the gears of the plot and sets the whole thing ticking. Pip’s encounter with Magwitch in the marshes; Roger Thornhill mistaken for George Kaplan in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel. A chance meeting that leads to real change. Is such an event, found in a novel, a contrivance? It might be argued that everything in a novel is a contrivance, and coincidences only happen to people who are paying attention.

Daphne and Jonathan are visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art when Jonathan spots an older man who seems to have been following them from gallery to gallery. Daphne is a teacher with a pleasant job at a private school; Jonathan, some years her senior, is a retired hospital administrator. The two, now decades married, met when she was caring for her dying father in hospital – although she had previously been estranged from him, after her mother had remarried and then married again. The mysterious man following them through the museum turns out to be Eddie, her stepfather for only a year, but a man, we discover, that she never stopped loving. The encounter provides a spur for the reader to wonder: what happened back then, and what will happen now? 

Few writers are more adept than Patchett at delineating the collisions between present and past. Her last novel, Tom Lake, was set during lockdown and gave us a chorus of daughters interrogating their mother about her past life as an actress. The Dutch House – like Commonwealth before it – tracked the fractures in a blended family, the kind that the author herself grew up in. But as Patchett, a richly inventive novelist, said of Commonwealth, quoting a phrase of her mother’s: “None of it happened and all of it’s true.” 

In Whistler, we learn that Daphne’s own mother worked as a publicist at New York publisher Houghton Mifflin, where Eddie was an esteemed editor. In the 1970s, to be a working woman – let alone a divorced single parent with two children (Daphne has a sister, Leda) – made getting a date pretty hard. But Eddie was both charming and caring, and it seemed as if Daphne’s mother had struck it lucky.

After getting married, the pair’s relationship ended abruptly – almost immediately after Leda was struck with appendicitis and nine-year-old Daphne and her stepfather were involved in a car accident. Daphne and Leda had no contact with Eddie in the years that followed. Her mother remarried, to a briefly successful self-help writer whose breakout book, Positivity!, was followed swiftly by Positively Positive!, Positive Every Day!, Positively Christmas! and suchlike. (One of the joys of this book, for this specific reader, was its sly take on the world of publishing and the occasional Easter egg, such as the mention of the – real life – agent Esther Newberg, who represents George Saunders and Tom Hanks.) 

Daphne’s narrative voice is both confident and inquisitive. Her observations about the nature of the world, or the other characters in the book, or what’s going on in her own heart, are invitations to the reader to consider the bigger picture. “Jonathan believes we all have our ministries,” she says of her husband and his vocation. “He had been a brilliant hospital administrator because he never stayed in his office. When he walked the halls, he kept an eye out for suffering.” We’re invited to consider – even subconsciously – whether we agree with Jonathan: and if we do, well, what’s our “ministry”? The reader is pulled in, hand over hand. 

The twists of this novel’s plot are not hairpin turns; its revelations are not extreme. Yet it would not do to give them away, all the more so because of their subtlety. The unfolding story explores the calm yet quietly transgressive love Daphne and Eddie share: at first, Jonathan thinks the stranger he spots might have an amorous interest in his wife, since older men are her thing. And when the urbane Eddie invites Daphne to a black tie dinner, why doesn’t she tell her mother right away? 

The answer is that transgression can take many forms. It’s not always to do with sex, but often with loyalty. The Whistler of the title is a horse, a creature once owned, we’re told, by a writer Eddie was going to work with but never did. Whistler, loyal to his mistress in an almost mystical way, is a still presence at the centre of the book, and acts as a prism through which the shifting human allegiances of the novel may be viewed. 

This is a peaceful and gratifying read. There’s peril – Leda’s appendix, the car accident – but not too much. There’s strife – divorces, a complicated marriage – but not too much. There’s death, of course, but then death comes for us all in the end, and that’s OK too, because it has to be. 

Whistler by Ann Patchett is published by Bloomsbury (£20). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £18 (10% off RRP). Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Emily Dorio