In reading all of Ann Patchett’s ten novels, I have become accustomed to being astonished. In her stories, prisoners find common ground with their aggressors. More than once, someone reported to be dead has turned out not to be so. Identities are switched, relationships are upended. I say her work leaves me “astonished” rather than “shocked,” because Patchett’s careful exploration of character motivation is honest and impartial. With other writers, such use of discovery and reversal may read as an artless gimmick. Patchett’s use serves to deepen the readers’ intimacy with her characters.

New information doesn’t undermine the old; it shows yet another angle we would have missed. The twists in her stories are textbook examples of what Aristotle describes in his Poetics as “probable impossibilities,” which he says “are to be preferred to implausible possibilities.” Her pacing is refined; just when it seems things have settled into place, some other information is revealed that alters what you thought you’d known all along. Kind of like life.

Her more recent work—Commonwealth, The Dutch House, Tom Lake, and Whistler—tends toward family dynamics in domestic scenes, where there might be all the tension of a hostage situation, though the stress is more deeply-seated, more firmly entrenched, more of a challenge to untangle. Not that there’s (much) violence.  Instead, we encounter imperfect commitment, disordered priorities, secrets too painful to be shared, and with these, their natural consequences—broken hearts, strained relationships, incomplete stories passed from one generation to the next.

Whistler is centered on its own “probable impossibility,” one quieter, subtler than those in previous novels, but which proves arguably more powerful. This latest novel is astonishing not for the surprise of protagonist Daphne Fuller reuniting with her estranged stepfather, Eddie Triplett, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but for the novel’s affirmation of the endurance of gentle love through decades of absence, for its celebration of the probable impossibilities life sometimes deals us.

Daphne and Eddie’s chance meeting at the museum is just that—a chance meeting. Nothing has been premeditated or manipulated. There are no ulterior motives at play. It is unlikely that the two should find themselves on the same floor of this one museum in Manhattan on this particular day, but sometimes, for whatever reason, these things happen.

Daphne is fifty-three. When she last saw Eddie, she was nine, and he was briefly married to her mother. Soon after he and Daphne were in a car accident—and let it be known, it was truly an accident—Eddie and Daphne’s mother divorced. Eddie disappeared from their lives. Daphne assumed she was somehow at fault. Her sister, Leda, was hospitalized at the same time with appendicitis. Once everyone recovered physically, there was little discussion of why things were changing. The girls had each other. Their mother married again and had two more children.

As Eddie and Daphne get reacquainted, they are reminded of how easy their connection has always been. Their conversations are a blend of remembering and sharing a lifetime of updates. Daphne is disappointed to admit what she doesn’t recall. Eddie seems to know so much more about her, Leda, and their time together. What she must appreciate is that she was a child when they last knew each other. Then, she didn’t need to know that Eddie was, in fact, gay, and had been keeping up a relationship with his college boyfriend on the side. She didn’t need to be clued in to the promise he’d broken to her mother and the regret they both had to navigate.

In keeping with the tone of the novel, this revelation is delivered gently, in stages. Leda’s son, Henry, tells Daphne that Eddie is gay before he confesses it himself. Likewise, Eddie’s leukemia diagnosis is revealed a piece at a time. (Again, a possibility that seems unlikely due to Eddie’s apparent good health.) Daphne’s husband intuits the illness through conversation and diffuses what could have otherwise been an explosive situation to give her space to process the news. Eddie is an older man. Daphne has already experienced the death of her birth father. A terminal diagnosis is never easy to take, but these gestures of support, these bits of familiarity soften the blow.

Leda, a therapist, is of the conviction that adults are constantly reliving their childhoods. While such revisiting is the subject of much of the novel, ordinarily Daphne doesn’t take the same analytic approach. She responds to life as it presents itself. Daphne met her husband, Jonathan, not through filters on a dating app, but in the hospital where her father died. Jonathan was “a brilliant hospital administrator because he never stayed in his office.” While he had a keen eye for suffering, his interest in Daphne was not an attempt to take advantage of her vulnerability. Theirs is a relationship built on kindness, compassion, and understanding. What she admires most about her husband is his ability to

stand beside suffering, not only the patients and their families, but the nurses and the doctors and the housekeeping staff. He knew when to speak and when to say nothing, when to bring a glass of water or take a stranger in his arms. He believed it was his job to comfort people, and he never turned away from the responsibility.

The same could be said of Daphne. Her passion is teaching English at a girls’ prep school. Her job description says literature, but she is uniquely tuned into the students whose parents are going through a divorce. Her open door is not a means of navigating her own unresolved grief. She is simply responding to the need she sees in her sphere. As Jonathan says, “we all have our ministries.” Who we minister to is often beyond our control.

For years, Eddie’s “ministry” has been editing, helping people tell their stories at a big New York publishing house. Though forty-four years ago he and Daphne promised each other they’d be writers, neither has made good on it. “Never too late,” Eddie says. And he’s right: among other things, their chance meeting is the impetus to Daphne writing their story, which becomes the book readers hold in their hands.

Daphne does not experience some life-shattering revelation in getting to know Eddie and then losing him again. Rather, she is encouraged and affirmed by their reconnection, this seeming impossibility leading her to a new leg of her journey. Before all of this has unfolded, Jonathan explains it this way: “It’s that we die, and we should think about doing the things we want to do while we’re able to do them.” Near the end of his life, Eddie puts it like this: “Once we’re comfortable with death, we’ll do a better job with our lives.” In becoming a writer, Daphne accepts another kind of ministry, one whose reach it will never be possible for her to know in full.

Lindsay Schlegel is a freelance writer and editor, as well as the author of two books for adults and one for children. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of St. Thomas, Houston, where she was a Scanlon Fellow.

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