Whistler Author: Ann PatchettISBN-13: 9781037206498Publisher: BloomsburyGuideline Price: £20If the American author, Ann Patchett, has a specialist subject it may be the intricate dynamics of blended families. Whistler, her 10th novel, exemplifies this capacity to articulate the silences often embedded in relationships as misguided attempts to ensure their survival. What is unusual in literature, however, is the lesser-told love story that can evolve between step-parents and stepchildren, that Patchett considers here. Daphne Fuller, a 53-year-old English teacher living in New York, is visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art when she is astonished to encounter a man she has not seen since she was nine years old: Eddie, her stepfather for just two years. What unfolds over the novel is the rekindling of their bond, interspersed with an account of the incident that Daphne has always believed was the root cause of the divorce that separated Eddie from her mother, and accordingly, her. As has been the case for Patchett’s most recent novels, this work offers a clear-eyed account of familial evolution over the decades of a lifetime. There is a refreshing no-nonsense energy to Patchett’s prose that enables her to excavate the depths of human emotion without ever becoming sentimental. A bittersweet acceptance of not only the heroics of the human heart but the foibles and fatal flaws also. There is a powerful undercurrent towing the narrative of Whistler forward, that “childhoods never leaves us. We seal the room up and cover it in sheetrock. We dry and sand and paint, but the pocket of history remains, and sooner or later someone always end up tapping on the wall, commenting on the way it sounds strangely hollow in there, and then the whole thing comes tumbling down”.Daphne’s sister, a therapist, encourages her to sort through her past so that she can “put the trauma in the trauma box and the grief in the grief box”, but she does not want to do this work, and so a part of her psyche is stuck. This is true despite the sisters acknowledging that they have turned out well; it is in this messy terrain where two seemingly opposite realities can both be true that Patchett’s skills astound. As such a charismatic storyteller, her novels are great company. Ultimately Whistler itself is a testament to the transformative power of storytelling, where no stories carry more weight than those we tell ourselves, about who we are and where we came from. Helen Cullen is the author of The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually and the forthcoming Iseult.