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I blame Meryl Streep. Once she’s in your head, it’s hard to kick her out. Streep narrated the audiobook of Tom Lake, Ann Patchett’s last novel, and I’ve played it so many times I listen for the rhythm now, not the story. Or perhaps the rhythm is the story. Nothing much happens in Tom Lake, which is to say that everything happens – life happens – but ever so gently. On a cherry farm in Michigan, a mother tells her restless, world-hungry daughters the tale of a long-ago summer romance, piece by piece, as they work the harvest together. It’s Scheherazade with pie.
Tom Lake is a lovely book, indulgently so. A pandemic novel that imagines the crisis as Edenic: a family thrown together with little to do but talk and remember and cherish one another. Sun-ripe fruit, rescue dogs, the future paused for one last impossible season. Some ingenue glitz; a whiff of tradwifery. A lesson – quite literally – in cherrypicking.
It’s as easy to mock as it is to love. Tom Lake shares a wistful shelf with Lily King’s Heart the Lover and David Nicholls’s Sweet Sorrow; books that could be mawkish, were they not so perfect. But is there such a thing as too perfect? Enter Whistler, Patchett’s new novel.
Daphne Fuller is a high-school English teacher “plunged back into childhood” by the sudden reappearance of Eddie Triplett, her favourite stepfather (like Patchett, she has had enough of them to rank). Daphne peddles classic novels to teenagers; Eddie is a Manhattan literary editor who refuses to retire. They’re kindred bookworms – “hearts … forever stitched together” – but they haven’t seen each other for 40 years, not since Daphne’s mother filed for divorce.
When the two collide at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, they slip back into devotion with an ease that almost feels illicit. But there’s also a surge of sunk-cost grief – all that wasted time. “Somewhere deep inside myself, in a place inaccessible to me since I was nine,” Daphne tells us, “I had missed him every day of my life.”
Whistler takes us back to the winter night that cleaved them: a car accident, a lonely hill, a mean frost. It sounds dramatic, but in Patchett’s world, calamity has good manners. That was the night young Daphne decided the world was a kind and decent place, a decision that’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now she lives a pearl of a life: comfortable, tranquil, loved by a steadfast man. She’s not immune to sorrows, but they are the price she pays for loving well. The loss of Eddie is the piece of grit that made it all possible. That’s the story Whistler has to tell: the sharp kernel of Daphne’s happiness.
It’s Tom Lake redux, the cherry orchard swapped for the leafy commuter suburbs of Westchester County (goodbye Chekhov, hello Cheever). But gone are the lurking Anthropocene terrors that gave that book its ballast – the sense that the farm was a shared delusion as much as a paradise. Here, death is coming, but life is catered. Daphne and Eddie go to champagne brunches and chardonnay lunches; share a lost lifetime of secrets, and a slow dance. The past is held up and examined like a snow globe, given a pretty little shake. But what matters is the perpetual, beautiful now: “Oh, this moment, when all the leaves were fresh and the lilacs were out and New York seemed like the best idea.”
Daphne’s husband, Jonathan – “True-Love Jonathan” – is Patchett’s version of a manic pixie dream girl, the knight in shining stability. His grand flaw: he wants to whisk Daphne away for elaborate holidays but she doesn’t like to fly. Daphne’s sister, Leda, is the family daredevil. She went out on a limb to buy a David Hockney painting. Never fear, now it hangs in her Central Park apartment, where she basks in its eternal saturation.
Whistler is top-shelf comfort food, the literary equivalent of pricey ice-cream. We almost care about these vanilla-bean people. Their floral arrangements; their silk blouses; their dinky sailboats. But it’s all so neat. Take the surnames of our reunited soulmates: Daphne Fuller, whose cup is overfull; Eddie Triplett, one of three father figures. Or their meet-cute in the art gallery, which happens in front of a conveniently symbolic sculpture (the horses in this novel earn their keep).
Patchett flirts with the idea that the affection between Daphne and Eddie is curdled in some way. “Old guys love me. They had always loved me,” Daphne tells us early and often, and it feels like a warning. She worries that Jonathan will see Eddie as a threat; arranges secret meetings; lies by omission (“Whatever happened between me and Eddie this time around needed to be between the two of us”). But the beloved Mr Triplett is no Humbert Humbert. He’s trapped in an old love triangle, and a tired subplot. He deserves better. So do we.
In 2020, Patchett published an essay about her own trio of fathers. Returning to that essay, and the collection it sits in (These Precious Days), I’m reminded how wry and spiky Patchett can be: funny, flinty, magnificently unromantic. There’s a contradictory jostle in her nonfiction: the sense that she owns a brace of ballgowns, but you wouldn’t want to meet her in a dark alley. It’s hard not to wish she’d brought some of that same friction to Whistler, which often reads like a gratitude journal. There’s even a bag of sweet red cherries. I suspect they were picked in Michigan by a woman who sounds like Meryl Streep.
