Goodness leaps out at you in the unlikeliest places, in Ann Patchett’s books.
Bel Canto (2001), which won the Women’s Prize (then called the Orange Prize for Fiction) and the PEN/Faulkner Award, is about an unlikely friendship between a band of terrorists and an opera singer. In Commonwealth (2016), the most autobiographical of her works, an illicit relationship eventually brings two families together.
The author from Nashville has a new book out on Tuesday (June 2). Whistler is about Daphne, a 53-year-old woman who runs into her stepfather, a man her mother was married to for about a year when she was nine, after a gap of decades. The novel traces how small yet consequential moments can define our lives, and how goodness and love ultimately can change everything.
The twists come from an event remembered, a secret unveiled, and the idea that some of the worst damage can be done by people who meant no harm, and weren’t even doing any wrong.
Beneath it all is the messiness of family: betrayal, redemption, forgiveness, prejudice, love.
A few of the details are autobiographical, says Patchett, 62. “My mother married three times, and my father married twice. I always said I had three fathers and two mothers.”
They all gave her a different gift, she adds. “There are tremendous benefits to stability in family, and there are benefits to chaos. Ours was also a family of dysfunction and pain, in which we bruised one another. But I don’t think there is any family that’s not going to bruise.”
How does she view the idea that she writes about family, to the exclusion of other aspects of the world? “I find family so interesting. It’s such a huge part of our lives,” Patchett says. “And it’s like a deck of cards. You just keep shuffling, and they keep coming out in different ways. It never gets old for me…”
Maybe there will come a time when she will write a novel “about AI and tech or whatever other people are writing about,” she adds. “But this is such a rich vein. I’m not going to feel like I would be a more serious or more important novelist if I wrote about other things.”
Excerpts from an interview.
.
* Whistler has been an unusual journey for you…
It has. I had been working on another book for a long time, which wasn’t working out. I thought, “I need to just stop.” So I decided to do something else: write an essay with one small part about my late friend, Jim Fox, who died on his 85th birthday, in 2024.
When I was writing Jim’s voice, it just felt really good. I thought I would like to write a book that took all of my love for Jim and Jim’s love for me. Not the relationship or details, just the love. And I wrote this book very quickly.
It started with the tale about a woman and her horse, Whistler, and moved on very quickly from there. I usually think about what I’m going to write for a year or two and then spend a year or two writing the book. In this case, I spent about five days thinking about it, and just wrote it over the summer.
.
* Disaster and death play an unusual role in the book. Your protagonist, Daphne describes the day of a major car accident when she was nine as one of the happiest of her life…
She spent a whole day with the person she loved most. Eddie, her stepfather, always made her feel like the most important person in the world. She saved his life.
When I was a child, and that may be true for a lot of children, that would have been the ultimate fantasy: to save the person you love.
One of my closest friends is the children’s book author Kate DiCamillo. And she writes so much about the child hero, who everybody overlooks and yet they are the ones that save the day. So, yes, Daphne is very close to death that day, but eventually there’s such a sense of joy.
.
* You’ve said that you long to give people “good, smart, literary fiction that will not crush their souls”. Is that still the goal?
I read so many stories that are so brilliantly written, and they do, they crush me. And I don’t wish them to be different. I love them. But I also think there needs to be a book or two in there that doesn’t crush you.
It has to do with perspective, though. I thought Commonwealth was funny… but people have said it’s the saddest book they ever read. I guess it has to do with what your idea of unbelievably sad is.
.
* You run an independent bookstore, Parnassus, in Nashville, Tennessee. And that’s sort of changed your life, hasn’t it?
I love my bookstore. It was the fork in the road of my life and, 15 years later, it’s made my life so much better. Yet it’s made my life into the life of such a public person too.
I’ve got to be the person at the protest, talk about book-banning, shopping local, fair labour practices. I’m really good at it but I think of that other self who stayed in a room and wrote books all day. And was very quiet. I don’t want to be ungrateful but I would also like to crawl under the bed, and that life just went in another direction.
Then again, I do love it. I love the videos we do online, which I started doing in the pandemic and which we’ve kept up because people said, oh please don’t stop. We recommend books in the videos, and that really is from my heart. Whenever I meet anyone in my life, I always want to say: Let me tell you what to read. I feel like maybe my mission in life is to hold up other people’s books and say: Read them! It’s kind of a miracle that I am still writing myself.
