Writers Review: Guest feature by Jon Appleton: 'This is the Time We Have'

"I’ve reviewed Ann Patchett’s most recent decade of writing here on Writers Review across various posts. Maybe you’ve been reading alongside me, but if you’ve yet to read her work, perhaps I might suggest a roadmap ... "

Jon Appleton is a freelance editor and writer. He publishes his research into the history of children's literature in a free e-zine called the gab. Visit: lettersfromrobin.com/the-gab

There is a moment about 50 pages into Whistler, Ann Patchett’s new novel, her tenth, where the narrator, 53-year-old Daphne Fuller, is speaking with Jonathan, her husband of two decades, and her senior by almost as many years. Jonathan is adjusting to retirement but Daphne isn’t ready for that change. They’re talking about their lives – what’s worked for them so far, and what may work for them in the future. Or not.

Jonathan looks at Daphne and says, ‘This is the time we have.’

Later in the novel, ‘They had nothing but time’ is even more resonant.

For me, these are a-ha moments, where a decade of reading thrillingly coalesced. I’ve actually been a fan of Ann Patchett for much longer than that – since her Women’s Prize-winning novel Bel Canto – but my appreciation has deepened over the last five books, a mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

Patchett’s novels are about the time we have available to us and the memories we can fit within the framework of now. These aren’t ‘what if’ scenarios but ‘what can we do with what’s happened’. She once wrote of her own personal experience: ‘we were so in the middle of history that we had no way to understand what we were seeing.’* Her novels reveal a process of restricted reclamation. That means rejecting a bunch of things that don’t fit – and people, too. The people we can make room for aren’t necessarily our nearest and dearest. That often makes things … awkward.

Jonathan was widowed when he and Daphne met. Weirdly enough, they met in a professional capacity – surgical Jonathan treated Daphne’s dad, Buddy Zabriskie, late in life. Jonathan had two daughters with his first wife. Daphne does her best to get on with her stepchildren but she knows the limitations of the relationship. She sees what they see: ‘You make me sad, was what she was saying. You who weren’t supposed to be here.’ But here she is. They’re dealing with it.

Another brilliant line gives us ‘when you start to wonder about who you’ve hurt in this life, you can easily lose your mind.’ That’s Eddie Triplett advising against retrospective angst. He’s the disrupter of the novel. More than 40 years ago, he was briefly married to Daphne’s mother, Abigail, after she’d divorced Buddy, her girls’ father. In divorcing Eddie, Abigail not only banished him from the family but the publishing house for whom they both worked. The reason was apparently simple. One night, when Daphne was nine and her younger sister was fighting for her life in hospital, Eddie took Daphne – whom he adored and was fiercely adored by in turn – for a drive, and ran the car off the road. He smashed his foot and Daphne’s face was cut – she also had to free herself from the wreckage to seek help in deep snow. Nobody died, as Abigail has always admitted. So why the fierce ejection? Could there be another reason?

After Daphne meets Eddie unexpectedly one day in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in the first pages of the novel, they have to address that reason.

She also has to finally explain that night to Leda, her brilliant sister, and so, alongside the story of Daphne and Eddie’s renewed acquaintance, we revisit the events of January 1980 and ultimately learn the story of a story Eddie told Daphne in the smashed-up car about a horse called Whistler which illustrates the many ways we fail each other and what a truly spectacular – yet almost mythic – thing it is to be capable of offering unequivocal loyalty.

Most of us will never manage that. We might be ‘decent people, smart people’, like the characters in this book, but acts of transcendence are generally elusive.

This dilemma applies to the characters in Tom Lake, Patchett’s previous novel, set during the Coronavirus lockdown where a mother reclaims her family – no mean feat, in the circumstances – and bows to their request to explain her past. It’s true, too, of Commonwealth, Patchett’s glorious seventh novel, which also concerns a moment in the past that shatters the status quo and a reciprocal moment in the present which has its own deep repercussions. But Commonwealth delves and weaves between the decades in a way that Whistler doesn’t. Whistler felt like a slighter novel as I read it – it’s certainly shorter – but the funny thing is, it’s stayed in my mind more vividly than any other Patchett novel I’ve read. Whistler makes fewer promises but to my mind it delivers most assuredly on the pledges it makes.

And actually, if you read Whistler (which I hope you do), you might agree with me that Buddy Zabriskie, though perhaps a failure as a husband and father, manages the transcendental.

While we’re speaking of fathers, I should mention that Daphne and Leda had a third – after Eddie, Abigail married again, an author, and lived with him for forty years, bearing him two sons. Daphne hasn’t ever felt attached to Lucas, but there he is, in her life, anyway, and in her story. And I should also mention that Ann Patchett herself has had three fathers. She wrote about them in an essay called Three Fathers in her essay collection, These Precious Days. She also has an older, surgical husband, and has narrated the audiobook of Whistler. Know that her non-fiction and fiction flow into each other unapologetically. It’s the time she has, right?

I’ve reviewed Ann Patchett’s most recent decade of writing here on Writers Review across various posts. Maybe you’ve been reading alongside me, but if you’ve yet to read her work, perhaps I might suggest a roadmap.

I would start with Commonwealth, and then segue into the essays in These Precious Days.

Then I’d dive into her exotic novels – where she comes as close to ‘what if’ as she dares – Bel Canto and State of Wonder.

Then I’d read The Dutch House.

And then Whistler – and hope you’ll feel as willing as I do to go where she’ll take us next.

Whistler is published by Bloomsbury.

Jon's other reviews of Ann Patchett:

These Precious Days and This is the Story of a Happy Marriage