When Daphne Fuller and her husband Jonathan visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they notice an older, white-haired gentleman following them. The man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, who had been married to her mother for a little more than year when Daphne was nine. Now fifty-three, Daphne hasn’t seen Eddie for many years, not since the fateful event that changed the direction of both their lives. Meeting again, time falls away; while their relationship was brief, it had a profound impact on them both, and now that they are reunited, they have no intention of ever being separated again.
This is vintage Patchett ... Patchett in a lighter register, its tempo brisk as a short story’s. It’s a drama of manners, a nostalgic interpretation of what family looks like in a rarefied space far removed from soaring gasoline prices, populist anger and Trumpian rage. It’s also a lament for our vanishing literary culture. It may lack the narrative heft of The Dutch House and Bel Canto, but it scatters a similar fairy dust across its pages, delivering its pleasures with wit and panache.
The dramatic tension,...isn’t interpersonal but man versus the inexorable march of time ... Absence of edge can at times lead to a lack of narrative tension in her fiction ... Charm is less plot-driven than dialogue-driven. Daphne’s repartee with her entourage keeps the sentimentality just about in check.
Is there such a thing as too perfect? Enter Whistler, Patchett’s new novel ... The past is held up and examined like a snow globe, given a pretty little shake. But what matters is the perpetual, beautiful now ... Whistler is top-shelf comfort food, the literary equivalent of pricey ice-cream. We almost care about these vanilla-bean people. Their floral arrangements; their silk blouses; their dinky sailboats. But it’s all so neat ... Often reads like a gratitude journal.
