Whistler by Ann Patchett: a pacy metafiction where rich people are nice to each other

By Rona Cran, Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century American Literature, University of Birmingham

In Ann Patchett’s 11th novel Whistler, a former stepfather and stepdaughter, Eddie and Daphne, meet again by chance after 44 years. They rekindle their bond (before long, Eddie is introducing Daphne as “my daughter”) and revisit the events that prompted Eddie’s abrupt departure from her life when she was nine.

Eddie is a fiction editor beloved by everyone – his name “a bass note called again and again”. Daphne is a private school English teacher “safely past 50”, who describes her post-Eddie childhood as a period of “estrangement”. Both had (unrealised) ambitions to be novelists.

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