‘Whistler’ by Ann Patchett: A luminous story of loving the family beyond one’s capacity
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Ann Patchett’s Whistler opens with its protagonist, 53-year-old Daphne Zabriskie, running into her former stepfather on a random Friday. It’s a loaded encounter. Daphne bursts into tears, and Eddie Triplett – the stepfather in question – decides he needs a drink before noon. But it means that over 40 years later, their lives are connected again – a reality that they spend the rest of the time settling into.
Eddie is one of three fathers to Daphne and her sister, Leda: their late biological father left them to live on his sailboat full-time, and their mother’s current husband is cordial but has a family of his own. Eddie is the brief but joyous interlude between those two. Joyous, because he was deeply involved in parenting the girls (who were then nine and seven, and lived with him), and brief, because their mother divorced him and forbade any contact after he and Daphne nearly died in a car accident.
The past is a room
To talk about such a story, let us first address what it is not. As much as Whistler deals with wounds, it is not a tale of “healing”, which is to say, the characters do not wish to explain their experiences, and they do not describe...