The prose in this book is particularly good. When I read, it takes me time to put the scenes on in my head. For me, it's like putting on socks; I notice when I put them on how they feel on my foot, and I notice when I take them off that I stopped noticing them at all. Similarly, prose has to settle in my mind before I can watch the imagery play in my head. Not Whistler by Ann Patchett. The very first chapter was so well crafted that I started to notice how little Patchett had to say in order for me to see her scene. The only thing I don't jive with in that chapter is that our main character is fifty three; her age was unbelievable. In that scene, this husband and wife walking in an art gallery are young, late twenties maybe, not in their seventies and fifties! However, that sense of vigor in our main character could either be purposeful, or a classic case of the art doing a better job than the artist. Our narrator (the main character) has imperfect knowledge, and is imperfect herself. She sees herself young and laments, though we get the sense it is a mix of annoyance and pride, that older men love her. Her husband Jonathan pokes fun at her for it, as she told him years ago and he holds onto it. This is maybe meant to be completely unbeknownst to the reader, but I get the sense this is symptomatic of a girl who grew up too fast. We're informed of the male figures in her life; they are come-and-go, either through the fault of her mother choosing a father who was never around, or maybe through her mother not giving Eddie, her second stepfather and the old man following them around the Met, a fair shake. We learn our main character was involved in some sort of car accident with Eddie. We learn through a visit with our narrator's sister that their mother has a propensity for leaving narratives (and it's actors) in the past. This avoidance is thus imprinted unknowingly in our main character, who doesn't understand why she unravels the moment someone from a past narrative walks in, says hello, and calls her duck. We're never told how these underlying traumas explicity affect our narrator, but that is the beauty of the prose. It takes us six pages to learn Daphne's name, and of course it would. the characters all know each other and they certainly know Daphne's name. Her name wouldn't be asked for naturally. This is the heart of it: Patchett writes how we think we write, or how we think we orate stories; Patchett writes quietly, giving just the right amount of context to put the socks on without us noticing.
There was a wedding speech near the beginning of this story. Some particular lines from it:
"Back in those days, nineteen-year-olds had the answer to that question, and even if we were wrong, and we were usually wrong, we went forward with a great deal of purpose."
"There is so much randomness to youth."
"There are ten grandchildren now. Ten new people who in part owe their lives on earth to Skip admitting that there was something deeply familiar about the girl he had passed, and trusting himself enough to turn around to go back and see who she was."
In the book, I wrote in the margins often so I could remember what I was thinking. It was a wonderful speech, and it caused me to reflect on my own art, and because Ann Patchett was able to show us this scene and give us those wonderful lines, I reflected particularly on my own writing. I write:
"The problem with my writing is that when I come back to it, I expect to have made something beautiful and instead find a first draft."
A page later, when Patchett reminds us that weddings are beacons of hope for bachelors and bachelorettes, when she says "Despite all the fires in the world, on this night, in this room, they believed the whole thing might work", I reflect on my past relationships. I wrote in the margins:
"I also thought I could beat the odds once. I wish we had more money for the wedding. I wish I held her more, in my arms and in my thoughts, in my words and in my actions. I should have done more. Like before, we had a beautiful first draft and I turned away thinking it was done. It wasn't quite enough, unfortunately."
We are introduced the mother as a real character in present day one-hundred-and-fifty pages into the book. Daphne gives us some context on how exactly her mother moved on, who she was, what she did. How her mother moved through time. In this descriptive page, I fill the margins:
"We're first introduced to the story as Daphne's fourty-four year past catches up with her. She laments on how older men are into her. She mentions her age difference with her husband. Her stepfather, now as old as her husband, comes to reminisce. She goes to her sister and is sucked back in to an old trauma from when she was young. We watch as this past slowly comes back to her, and unravels her, in a way that causes her to see those people she left behind as different: hated and loved, mistaken and assured. We as a third party can see Daphne, through these various experiences, but the real interest of this story is in understanding why she is the way she is, what in particular time has done to her. This book is obsessed with time."
The surface-level tale is centered around a woman's stepfather walking back into her life after being long forgotten. We learn that Daphne still loves her stepfather eddie, we learn about an accident that seemingly caused the fracture between her mother and this man, and we learn eventually that the real reason why the split happened was that Eddie was in love with someone else. This story ends with Eddie dying. It moves from the past to the present at times when Daphne or another character wants us to know what happened back then.