Too Sweet for My Taste

If writers “write what they know”, Ann Patchett must live an enviable life. Her previous novel, Tom Lake, and this one, Whistler, both describe the very comfortable lives of upscale New Yorkers. They are rarely troubled by quotidian problems, or if they are, those are easily resolved with money. Beyond the wealth, all of the characters in these last novels have also been very very nice. They are cheerful and well-adjusted. There are few rough edges in their interactions. Their history rarely burdens them in a negative way.

While this may be a kind of reality for some, it makes these books less relatable, and removes any possibility of narrative tension.

In Whistler, middle-aged Daphne is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when she and her (wonderful, needless to say) husband Jonathan notice an elderly man following them around. He turns out to be Daphne’s (wonderful) ex-stepfather, Eddie, who had been married to her mother for about a year, when Daphne was ten.

Daphne’s own birth father, Buddy, left their mother soon after the two girls were born, but Daphne and her sister have no lingering resentments over this abandonment. They loved Eddie too, and they quite like Lukas, their mother’s current husband. Eddie says very nice things about Buddy, quite unperturbed by the abandonment:

“He was such a decent man who had no business getting married, certainly no business having children.”

Many readers might ask: but once Buddy had a wife and children, did he not have any responsibility for them? Why are all the other characters so forgiving of his desertion and lack of support for his own family? As for Eddie, why does no one mind that he did not attempt to keep in touch with his beloved step-daughters after his divorce?

Daphne’s sister Leda is married to Steve, another charming man, and they have a sweet-natured, astonishingly polite and kind seventeen year old son, Henry (such common things as teenage rebellion do not impinge upon the lives of these characters), and a real David Hockney painting in their living room.

It’s all ‘happy-families’ except for Daphne’s mother, Abigail. The reader is told (not shown, alas) that

Abigail was not an unsympathetic character.

which almost sounds like the author is heading off any criticism of Abigail. What is Abigail’s awful fault? She has a job she loves, and occasionally relies on Eddie to manage child-care. She is clearsighted and willing to say the things that everyone else elides.

Of all the characters, the most unsympathetic is actually Daphne, the protagonist. She married Jonathan, a widower who came with two daughters. The first hint of awkwardness is when she meets them and discovers she is closer to their age than his.

They would not forgive me my age. Nor were they pleased to find out we’d already been seeing each other for a year.

But then, the very next paragraph negates any tension.

We were not a catastrophe, Sydney and Rachel and I. We were all decent people, smart people. They loved their father and wanted his happiness. They only wished that happiness had been found with someone his own age, and that maybe it could have come a little later.

There is a deep secret buried for decades, but it is exposed fairly early in the book (by the lovely Henry), that one of the characters is gay. Thereafter, the plot is more of an exploration into the hows and whys of someone would hide their gayness back in the 1950s, how everyone colluded to pretend the person was not gay, and how things have changed in the intervening 40-50 years.

The title? Whistler is a horse who saved his beloved owner when injured, by coming when called with a whistle. The parallels to Eddie’s car accident when Daphne went to get help are obvious, but the whole story of Whistler seemed like an unnecessary digression to me.

Patchett’s writing, as always, goes a long way to compensate.

Both of the girls were capable of running into him with the velocity of cannonballs, but they could also rest beside him like leaves.

Occasionally the sentiments become cloying, as when Daphne says:

“How did I know this? Because I wanted to die myself, and our hearts were forever stitched together, mine and Eddie’s.”

Patchett is an accomplished and experienced writer, so her books are always readable, with never an awkward sentence or a misplaced word. Her writing is always a pleasure to read. By the end of Whistler, though, I was bored of the characters and their sweetly perfect lives.

---

Whistler

Ann Patchett

Harper, 2026.