August 19, 2026

Whistler, by Ann Patchett

It just so happened that I ran out of things to do on Friday afternoon, which is a situation that I don’t encounter very often, and it also just so happened that I had a hammock and a copy of Ann Patchett’s new book, Whistler, with which to fill that little window of time that had just opened in my life. I’d started reading Whistler the night before, and I was already in its thrall, and settled into my hammock to savour the rest, the experience recalling the time I barrelled through most of The Dutch House in the bathtub. And I can’t help but think that this is the best way to read Ann Patchett, to eliminate all other distractions and wholly submit to the narrative, letting the novel hold you, the way a bathtub or a hammock might. I don’t have a photo of the novel taken in the hammock, my feet popping up in the background to affirm that all this is a true story, because my phone was far away, and the story of Daphne’s encounter with an elderly man at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and everything that happened after that became my whole wide world.

I love this novel. It’s so strange, and slow, and breaks all the core rules of novel writing—especially TWO CHARACTERS TALKING ABOUT SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED DOES NOT MAKE A SCENE. The whole novel is characters talking about things that happened, things that happened decades ago but what makes it so compelling is the revelations that arrive with the telling, revelations that re-frame everything the characters thought they knew about themselves and each other.

And I think it’s a novel that really benefits from singular focus, from being able to sink deeply into it. (I liked Tom Lake a lot, but I was reading it in bits and pieces, and these novels are best appreciated as wholes.) Patchett’s narrative voice is one that holds the reader so carefully, precisely, assuredly—the same way that Daphne and her stepfather were held on a hillscape all those years ago, trapped in their car which had gone off the road, stopped midway down, the car on its side, and any sudden movement might trigger the car to roll further. The same way that Daphne is held by the story her stepfather tells her during that long night while they’re waiting for light. The same way that I was held by my hammock as I read Whistler last Friday, into the evening, absolutely riveted by the strangeness of the story, the unlikeliness and specificity that makes it read as true, that makes its ending simultaneously unbearable, and also one of the most glorious stories I’ve ever read in my life.