In Defense of Chaos and the Inspiration for My Return to Gothic Horror: Whistler by Ann Patchett--a "cozy" fiction

Normally I roll these reviews out the day after I finish the book; however, I needed a moment to sit with this one: it was a good book, but I didn’t like it, and I needed to figure out why.

Before I even begin, it’s interesting to me to note that one of my favorite authors on Substack, John Warner, recently published an article in which he suggested the one way large publishing houses might employ GenAI effectively. I will not provide a spoiler on his thesis in that article here; go find it and read it for yourself. However, in the article he singled out Harper Collins as one of those publishers whose use of GenAI in the publication process is the most problematic, saying for that reason he will not be reviewing any more of Ann Patchett’s books. The timing was eerie: I had just finished Whistler the day prior and was gearing up for my own review. While Warner’s boycott of Harper Collins is interesting to me, I’m such small potatoes that my review of Whistler surely won’t matter, so in a very selfish attempt to exercise my own brain, I’m going to explore why the book didn’t work for me—and yes, write my review.

Patchett’s Whistler is the story of a woman, Daphne, reconnecting with her former stepfather, Eddie, after forty-something years of estrangement. It is an exploration of human relationships, during which our protagonist exemplifies grace for each of the people who have shaped her life: her thoughtful husband, her semi-absent father, her aloof mother, her disappeared ex-stepfather, and her current distant stepfather, among others at the fringes. The story is beautiful in the way our protagonist, Daphne, holds space for every personality and every tenor of relationship in her life—even those she once thought had failed her. There are many messages to take from this story, not the least of which is that people shape us, and that shaping is always silver lined, whether it was for the better or for the worse.

What makes the story work well is its crystalline writing, engaging dialogue, and unique structure. What made it not work for me is a matter of taste: it grated against my nature that a story should lack the highs and lows of human emotion—or any critical conflict.

Let’s start with the writing. Patchett’s language is precise, clear, and correct. While she seems to avoid the literary maximalist sentence styles that I wish we’d see reappear in popular fiction these days (the sort you’d find in the Romantic period), her sentences are not the choppy, fragmented, quippy sort (you know, those annoying one-word sentences) that I so detested in Jen Beagin’s New York Times bestselling books—which was a relief.

Patchett’s dialogue might be a mixed topic for me, now that I’m inspecting it more closely. While the dialogue was complex, always contributed to the plot, and expertly managed by employing character actions instead of signal phrases, there were times I found it confusing. There are two explanations for this. First, by Patchett’s limited use of signal phrases, there were a few exchanges where I became confused about who was saying what—and when you changed the speaker of the words, the story altered completely. I was twice forced to go back with my finger and count quotes to determine who was talking.

But there was another issue that is more of a me problem: many elements of dialogue assumed the reader has a strong hold on social mores (which, sadly, I don’t). One great example of this is the moment Eddie’s friend Polly accuses Daphne of pursuing a relationship with Eddie because he has leukemia and “maybe you’ve got some score to settle or maybe you think there’s money” (204). To diffuse this situation, Daphne’s husband, Jonathan, tells Polly that Ed’s health is fine. Somehow, by letting Polly know that Ed is going to be okay, Polly’s suspicions about Daphne just—disappear? And neither Daphne nor Jonathan ever again mention Polly’s wild accusation and attack on Daphne’s character. The whole thing just goes—blip! Gone. Perhaps Patchett’s intention is to illustrate the ponderousness of peoples’ emotions (Polly’s specifically here) in such interpersonal conflicts. But I was not gifted a social mind. Social graces elude me. What happened in this exchange made no sense to me, and there were many equally confusing dialogue exchanges throughout the story. People are enigmas.

The book’s framing device is unique, though, which the reader is not made aware of until its final pages.

***SPOILER ALERT***

At some point when Eddie was actively Daphne’s stepfather (she was about nine), they both promised each other that they would become novelists. At the end of the book, Eddie has lost the opportunity to become a novelist himself and suggests to Daphne to fulfill her end of their promise that she should write this story (their reunion forty years later) and the story of hers and Eddie’s car accident (when she was nine), which encapsulates another story about the horse named Whistler. In the end, we learn this novel is the one she promised Eddie she’d write before he passed away. It’s all tied up very nicely in a pretty bow. Feels good.

What didn’t work for me about this novel is more a matter of taste than anything else, and for that reason I feel badly holding it against the author: the plot feels stagnant and the protagonist seems to lack the full spectrum of human emotion.

Ultimately, nothing really happens in the book. Aside from the car accident (and the brief snippets about Mary Carter’s fall from her horse, Whistler), the remaining plot is comprised of people bopping between one social situation or another. Or sitting through chemo. In fact, there’s about a 30-page segment during which Patchett carries the reader through small talk at Polly and Skip’s 50^th Wedding Anniversary Gala, followed immediately—the same night!—by a wedding reception. OK. I may be alone in this, but I don’t enjoy subjecting myself to such social settings in real life; I certainly do not want to have to be stuck in them while reading a book. It reminds me of this one writing workshop classmate I had who wrote a scene in his memoir of watching paint peel, and I looked at him, like, “Why would you make your reader sit through this?”

One reviewer on Goodreads gave this book a gazillion stars and said it was like cuddling up under a warm blanket. That reviewer was right, but whether a “cozy” book is enjoyable is apparently a matter of taste. The book feels comfortable because it lacks conflict. This takes me back to the time I watched The Boys in the Boat with my in-laws while my husband was out of town. By the end of the movie, I realized I’d been sitting stock straight waiting for something bad to happen, but it never did. Each time the team approached a new challenge, I steeled myself for their failure, which never, ever, came. There was a challenge; the team overcame it. There was another challenge; the team overcame it. Sure, there was conflict in the form of challenges, but there was never any failure. Never that level of conflict. It’s like this new season of Ted Lasso, too. The first three seasons were characterized by failure—failure at every turn! Bad things happen! The team must overcome! But not this new season of Lasso, oh no. The women’s team can only seem to win. It feels disingenuous. It doesn’t feel real. Sure, in Whistler there is a car accident and Eddie’s leukemia, but in both cases the protagonist overcomes the challenges without failure—without any apparent struggle, really.

Which brings me to my frustration with the protagonist, in particular. She seems…emotionally flat? Everything that happens is always ok. She never gets mad. She never gets frustrated. She never blames anyone—ever—for the ways they’ve inconvenienced her. She’s like me after starting HRT. And this me is boring as hell! When I write protagonists, I write the me that happened back when my hormones fluctuated monthly. Maybe I even write a caricature of that woman, one with acute PMDD. That woman rides a rollercoaster of emotions: the highest highs and the lowest of lows. And her stories are electric! Horrifying, even! She is not perfect. She is not ethical or morally correct. She’s a hell of a mess and she makes a million mistakes, burning bridges right and left, and that’s how I like her. I found Daphne to be a role model for Buddhist acceptance; while I might want her as a friend IRL, I did not find her to be an engaging protagonist for a novel. And again, that’s fine. These things are a matter of taste.

At this point, anyone reading my reviews will know that my tastes run toward the dramatic, the horrific, the Gothic. A “cozy” book just wasn’t going to do it for me. Nevertheless, the read was enjoyable, the writing was skilled, and the pages passed quickly. I’d recommend this book for certain people with certain reading interests—but probably not those with a penchant for horror.

P.S. Guess my next two reads! The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I’m going home, y’all, and have unearthed from my shelves out about six months worth of readings from my MA in Lit class: Gothic Fiction. We’re diving deep for the next novel inspo. No more of this “cozy” fiction stuff. Cheers!