“There is so much randomness to youth. The person assigned to share your room becomes your friend, the girl you pass on your way out the door becomes your wife, and from these random encounters our entire lives are built”
When Daphne Fuller and her husband Jonathan visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they notice an older gentleman following them. The man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, who had been married to her mother for a little over a year when Daphne was nine. Now fifty-three, Daphne hasn’t seen Eddie since the divorce and the fateful event that changed the direction of both their lives. Meeting again, the look back over the choices they made and the choices that were made for them. This is a story about memory and the consequential moments that define our lives and the endless loss that in time comes for us all.
If you do not like character driven books, this one is most definitely not for you. I’ve always said that I prefer Patchett’s nonfiction to her fiction but there is something about Whistler that brings that version of her writing over to fiction. This story has extremely normal characters who have lived normal lives and have normal hangups with their childhood. I think I’m so used to expecting bombastic things and revelations to happen when someone from the past comes back into fictional lives that I held my breath waiting for Eddie to do or say something inappropriate and it just doesn’t happen. I think Patchett manages to bring a little bit of kindness into literary fiction and still makes it pleasurable to read. Where not everything wrong thing your parents did in your childhood is seen as having completely ruined your life, where parents are treated like human beings and given a little grace to be that.
We witness Daphne’s relationship with her sister, Leda, and the complicated relationship they have with their mother and the siblings that came from their mother’s next and final marriage. Her relationship with her biological father who was flawed in many ways but tried to make up for it in ways he knew how to. I really enjoyed how nobody in this book was a saint or the devil. They were all trying to do the best for their happiness and the best for the children and the community they had around. We find out from the start that Daphne doesn’t fly but the reason isn’t revealed until much later, but her decision is sometimes a source of tension in her marriage to Jonathan.
At the heart of this book is the longing for family – the ones we are born into, the ones we inherit and the ones we choose. It explores the quiet spaces between a life well lived or a life just lived – the love, regret, forgiveness and the people we end up hurting and the justifications we give to that hurting. The story of Eddie’s relationship with his best friend is just heartbreaking for all involved but especially the best friend’s wife who didn’t have a say in the deceit.
This is a deeply compassionate novel and Patchett manages to do this in under 300 pages. I quite enjoyed this quiet book. Have you read this one? Did you enjoy it? I gave this 4 stars on Goodreads.
Leggy
