BOOK REVIEW: Whistler by Ann Patchett

I love it when a book lives up to the hype. I just finished Whistler by Ann Patchett and my heart was thoroughly warmed. This is a novel about a messy modern family, and people who are very good at life.

The protagonist, Daphne Fuller, is a high-school English teacher with a complicated backstory that includes an often-absent father (divorced from her mother when Daphne was young, and now deceased) and two stepfathers. She is very close to her sister Leda, but not so much to her much younger stepbrothers. She’s married to a wonderful, supportive older man. In her own middle-age, life is good. She experienced a significant, traumatic event in her childhood but is not traumatized. Her sister, a family therapist who now writes an advice column in the local paper, has unpacked her own trauma and is also happily married and well adjusted.

What throws them for a loop is the reappearance in their lives of stepfather #1, Eddie. Who is an editor for a big name publishing company. Daphne hasn’t seen him since she was nine. She had packed away the memory of him, despite the fact that they experienced a pivotal event together all those years ago. And despite the fact that he had been, for a very short period of time, the most stabilizing influence in her young life, and something of a soul mate.

The novel takes the reader back and forth in time to experience the modern day lives of the family as well as to circle around the pivotal event, yielding up the story little by little. No one has ever really talked about it, and everyone has a somewhat different view of what happened. Daphne and Eddie know best, but even they had no opportunity to discuss it afterward. And now, as they process it, all the feelings come out. It is remarkably healing.

And the story of Whistler the horse ties it all together.

Patchett writes people who are so interesting and so real that you wish you knew them. At one point, Eddie explains to young Daphne that the vast majority of people are inherently good. And when you read this, you can believe it.