There’s a horse on the cover of Ann Patchett’s Whistler, a novel that centers the love of family. The tale of a horse who rescues its owner links forever the short-term stepfather who tells it and his stepdaughter, Daphne, comforting them both during the bitter cold evening they spent sideways in a car, after an accident, when she was nine years old.
If you think that this novel is going nowhere good, you’re wrong. Whistler’s luminous ordinariness and its resurfacing of memories – the novel asks questions like, “I wondered what anyone ever knows about another person’s relationship?” romantic or platonic – compel us to examine how we show up for those we love.
The plot unfurls at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Daphne’s husband notices an older man, revealed to be Daphne’s stepfather, Eddie, following them, first through Arms and Armor, then Medieval Art, and finally to an unexpected reunion in Modern and Contemporary. For convoluted reasons, Daphne has not seen Eddie, one of three men her mother married, for decades. The rest of the book traces Daphne’s and Eddie’s reacquaintance, with supporting roles for her mother, her sister, and Eddie’s longtime friends, Skip and Polly.
Over a grand 40 pages early on, Whistler paints one of the most glorious New York evenings I’ve ever experienced–in literature or life–a tribute to the joy found in reuniting after decades. Daphne and Eddie, who keeps calling her his daughter rather than stepdaughter, attend a 50th anniversary celebration of people they know, crash a wedding at the Plaza of people they don’t, and end late that night with Daphne saying sleepily, “I still have a million and six questions” before Eddie leaves her, “squeezing [her] hand through the open window” of a taxi heading downtown.
In this entire tableau, I kept trying to pinpoint when in my life I had felt so simultaneously adventuresome and cared for – childlike, wondrous, protected.
Was it larks with my mom in New York City when I was 19, adoring the rotating Marriott Marquis view restaurant, sunsetted amid skyscrapers?
Was it traveling through Italy on my honeymoon, the setting since transplanted in my mind onto pieces of literature as I read them (see: Rebecca Serle’s One Italian Summer)?
Was it visiting downtown Los Angeles with my two children, staring at Jeff Koons’ bright-blue balloon dog at the Broad, slipping down Angel’s Flight on a century-old funicular for lemon ice cream, driving home sugar-happy with “Hey There Delilah” as lullaby?
Much as I tried to place it, I couldn’t. But this sweet fuzziness embodies the novel’s magic. Patchett evokes something just beyond specific memory, a sense of comfort and mulled wine and hot chocolate, the bells of a city ringing only for us. In fact, I’m realizing as I write that I’m paraphrasing “All the music of life seems to be/ Like a bell that is ringing for me,” in “Almost Like Being in Love,” from the musical, Brigadoon.
Maybe that’s what Whistler feels like – almost like being in love, with all the affection that can come from unconventional bonds. The friendship between a stepfather and his long-lost stepdaughter, who end up being each other’s people after all, becomes a stand-in for our own effervescent memories and an inspiration to create more of them.