I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what we bring, as readers, to the process of reading a book. I think it can feel as if we turn up to Chapter One as open and empty vessels, ready to fill up this pristine container with whatever literary sustenance is on offer. But the reality is that the book is ushered into the most private of inner sanctums, where we are quite without surveillance or restraint. Here the book performs for an audience of past and present iterations of our selves, all of whom bring their emotional baggage, their prejudices, their likes and dislikes, their eccentricities and peccadilloes, and their opinions. So many opinions, and none of them really scrutinized or fact checked. We are so keen these days to slap content warning signs on books, whereas really we’re the ones containing hazardous material to which the poor book, alone and unprotected, will be subjected.
Mulling over this made me think about the dangers of publishing a subtle book, and by subtle I suppose I mean books that take the ordinary everyday world as their situation and allow only ordinary things to happen there. The more we can relate to, the more we can project. And so the story gets all tangled up with what our aunt’s experience of a second wedding was like, or our sister’s of a caesarean section, or how we feel about our best friend being in debt on the credit cards and whether our own last outing to a museum was enjoyable or not. Perhaps it’s safer for authors to portray these kinds of situations only as backdrops to an attention seeking plot that will be very distracting. Or they happen to characters who are so caught up in a big emotional drama that… ditto. But then it can happen that a particularly skilled writer takes on ordinary life and the results can be devastating; out of such a reading experience can come that numinous feeling of being seen and understood and given solidarity. The feeling of finally hearing words that express something so deep it was hidden from view and we only now realise how much we needed it to be articulated. The books that achieve this are the books that will live on in the mind. And I think these are the real ‘high stakes’ of fiction, not some outlandish plot designed to provoke primal fear that we won’t think about two minutes after it’s been resolved. The real question of fiction is can it put life – not fiction – on the page.
But that’s only my opinion, a facet of my own inner reading world. Others may differ.
Ann Patchett’s Whistler is, more or less, just such a subtle book. It concerns 53-year-old English teacher, Daphne Fuller, who visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art one afternoon with her much older husband, Jonathan. He notices that they are being followed through the galleries by an elderly man and decides to confront him. The man is Eddie Triplett, formerly Daphne’s stepfather for a time that was all too brief, a time that was brought to a premature end by a car accident they were in when Daphne was nine. In the intervening years she hasn’t seen him once and has ostensibly almost forgotten him. Given these circumstances, the meeting is surprisingly momentous.
“All of this transpired quietly; no one turned to watch life’s drama unpacked in the gallery,” Daphne says. “I bowed my head and covered my face. I hadn’t known there was something in me to break, but there it was and break it did. I stepped into an open crack in time and fell backwards.”
You might notice that the three characters in this scenario are all in late middle to old age, an age when you might think that nothing much of interest will happen in their lives. But this is part of Patchett’s subtlety. The past now happens to Daphne and Eddie; it happens all over again so that they might live it fully, incorporate its meaning and significance, understand it, and this is by no means a negligible event. Daphne’s mother married three times, and Eddie was the stepfather she loved the most deeply. The ending of this marriage occurred in the middle of so much muddle and crisis, and was so abrupt and unheralded that it has left a lacuna in Daphne’s life, although she moved on from it without obvious trauma and has created a good life for herself since then. But now, she takes the reader with her on an exploration and an explication of that past, as the night of the accident is slowly and gradually revealed, and Daphne starts to fill in all the missing pieces it created. As she spends time with Eddie, she finds out more about him, about the real reasons his marriage to her mother broke down, about her mother’s experience. And along the way we learn about her real father and her other stepfather, about her close relationship to her sister, about her marriage, her fear of flying, the reasons she never chose to have children. Patchett’s skill as a writer is never more in evidence than in the way she weaves these family stories together. It is compelling and gripping and often extremely poignant.
This isn’t the kind of book where a terrible situation is healed because of new information added to the narrative. Daphne was fine before Eddie reappeared. Instead, the emphasis is thrown onto the illumination that love can provide – both in terms of enlightenment, but also in terms of the warmth, the sheer glow of pleasure that love brings with it. Immediately after the reunion at the Met, Daphne’s husband, Jonathan, goes away for a while in order to clear out his recently deceased mother’s house, and he needs Daphne to reassure him that she isn’t going to have an affair with Eddie while he’s gone. She really isn’t, but it’s profound love that’s come to the surface and there is an intriguing gloss of romance over the two of them. I felt, reading this, that I had an unusual degree of insight into their situation. Since my mother died, I have spent so much more time with my father who is a very quiet and retiring man. Growing up, my mother was always the parental vanguard. She took up the family oxygen and my Dad was fine with that; that was just how we all rolled. But once she had gone, I saw my father in the kind of detail I hadn’t experienced since I was a small child. I notice often these days how very alike we are. But my situation is different, or at least, my father’s is. He’s grieving the loss of a life partner, and he’s always known where to find me, so there is an asymmetry to any rediscovery that’s going on. Still, it gave the first half of the novel an extra glow for me.
However, there’s a danger, with the sort of material Ann Patchett is using, of falling into sentimentality, and sometimes she does. The story that Eddie tells Daphne in the car after the accident, the story that supplies the Whistler of the title, was one such case in point for me. I struggle with sentimentality, though this is not Patchett’s fault. I blame the movie, Ghost, which I sobbed through, mostly from sheer rage at the relentless emotional manipulation I was enduring. On that occasion I was stung by popular culture, and have been allergic to sentiment ever since. So I didn’t pay the right amount of attention to that story about the horse, Whistler, and what it would mean for the book as a whole. For a while after this, the book became very preoccupied with death. It turned out that this was as much Patchett’s theme as love was. I guess that’s the other issue that arises when you collect together a cast of reasonably elderly main characters. And here again Patchett lost me, and I had to skim read most of the final third. I’m not going to even try to justify this one; I just don’t like reading about the ordinary, sad end of life, which is my loss because I love reading about ordinary life in all its other aspects. Though I did read right to the end and felt pleased that Patchett didn’t go for the obvious conclusion. I should have trusted her quality and maybe risked myself more with the sections I skimmed.
So, my own particular troubles with Whistler were highly subjective and really shouldn’t be allowed to cast any shadow on what is an extremely well written, cleverly plotted, richly meaningful and heartfelt novel. Books take their chances with readers, and readers bring baggage. On which note, a final thought about the novel. I wondered how it was that Patchett’s narrative had this crystalline lucidity to it, how the interactions between her characters were so crisp and sharp, their lives so infinitely legible from the brief telling details we’re given. And it struck me that these people bring no baggage with them, shoulder no absurd burdens of responsibility, have no idiosyncratic flaws. There is no randomness to muddy the story. They are deep – but the water runs clear. You can make of that what you will.
Tales from the Reading Room 