More books should have opening scenes in art museums. One of the most charming memoirs in recent memory is “All the Beauty in the World,” by Patrick Bingley who worked as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for ten years. We enjoy the paintings vicariously. Just imagining them adds to the pleasure of the read.
Ann Patchett’s new novel, “Whistler,” her tenth, opens in the Met with the protagonist Daphne Fuller looking at paintings, when her husband Jonathan notices a man who seems to be following them from floor to floor.
Daphne is not worried or surprised. She says: “Old guys love me. They had always loved me.” Jonathan should know this: he is 70 and she 53. They were 30 and 47 when they met. They lay a little trap for the stranger who turns out to have been, briefly, Daphne’s stepfather, Eddie Triplett. They have not met in 44 years.
There is a reunion, a massive catching up, and, in a series of elegant, well-managed flashbacks, enticing without being exactly cliff-hangers, the story unfolds. We learn why Eddie and Abigail, Daphne’s mom, were only together two years when she ended it. We learn about Daphne’s childhood and about her sister, Leda. (Mom was a mythology buff for a while.)
We learn the story of Daphne’s biological father, the fisherman/lobsterman Buddy Zabriskie, a thoroughly likeable man, and why that marriage ended. And in due course, we learn of Abigail’s third marriage to Lucas Ekker who wrote a self-help bestseller called “Positivity” and followed that up with “Positively Positive,” “The Positivity Workbook,” “Positively Christmas,” “American Positivity,” “Positivity Pop” and “Positivity Every Day.” Lucas and Abigail become fabulously rich but Lucas, failing to learn anything from his own books, becomes depressed when the market for that stuff finally dries up.
Patchett is a much funnier writer than she is given credit for. And she has an amazing range. Raised in Nashville from the age of 6, the owner of Parnassus Books, Ann Patchett is one of the most famous Tennesseans alive, but she has set books in the jungles of Brazil, “State of Wonder,” and in Lima, Peru, “Bel Canto,” books that concern female fertility and opera, respectively. “Whistler” is set in the world of publishing in Boston and New York and in Westchester County.
Read “Whistler” with confidence. Relax, enjoy, you are in the hands of a master, an artist fully in control. Smoothly, Patchett narrates several different life stories: Jonathan’s relationship to his first wife, Leda’s work as a therapist—sorely needed in these difficult times, Eddie’s relationship to his college best friend, Skip, and his wife, Polly, and, at the center, the story of the great car wreck survived, just barely, by Eddie and Daphne and, of course, who Whistler was and why it matters.
