Why Is There a Horse on the Cover of this Book?
(NOTE: Some of the links in this blog are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on Amazon. Thank you for supporting my writing in this manner. More details here.)
*****
I was pulled right into this novel and gobbled it up quickly. It opens with Daphne Fuller and her husband, Jonathan, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City where he notices an older man following them. We quickly learn the identity of this man. He is Eddie Triplett.
Daphne’s mother, Abigail, had been married three times and Eddie was the second husband. The last time Eddie and Daphne were together was when she was nine. She is now fifty-three.
Eddie and Daphne were very close in the short time he was her step-father. Bonding them beyond their natural affections was the fact that they had been in a terrible car wreck together. It somehow precipitated Abigail’s sudden divorce from Eddie and his banishment from Abigail, Daphne, and her younger sister, Leda’s lives. Of course, Daphne always assumed she was somehow responsible for the divorce, but had buried the belief deep within.
In the first moments of their reunion at the museum, Eddie calls Daphne, “Duck,” obviously his pet name for her. This causes her to cover her face and sob. She thinks to herself, “I hadn’t known there was something in me to break, but there it was and break it did. I stepped into an open crack in time and fell backwards.”
The rest of the book is spent excavating the past. I will let Ann Patchett charm you with all the details when you read the book. Instead, I will talk about two things that are sort of peripheral. Such as…
Why is there a horse on the book’s cover?
I was pretty far into the book and enjoying it thoroughly but wondering when on earth a horse would enter this story set in New York City. It took until page 102 for the horse to appear. It arrives when Patchett employs a story-within-a-story and has Eddie – an editor at a major publishing house – tell Daphne about a manuscript he read by a woman named Mary Carter. Mary had a horse named Whistler, the best friend a girl could ever have, a horse who was always just a whistle away, ready to save the day.
By the way, in an interview with Seth Meyers, Ann Patchett acknowledges this horse oddity when she says, “If you don’t like horses and don’t want to read about a horse, this book is for you.” She goes on to say that the segment about Whistler is brief, only about five pages.
Another interesting tidbit from the interview is the fact that a friend of Ann Patchett’s painted the equine portrait and that the same friend painted the cover for The Dutch House. She said she likes to turn the cover art in to her publisher when she turns in the manuscript. For less famous authors this is interesting to hear. For those of us who are relatively unknown and have a “traditional publisher,” the cover art – indeed the title – is chosen by the publisher.
But back to the question of the horse, I’m thinking this will be the issue that book clubs chew when discussing the novel.
How does this book fit into Ann Patchett’s creative oeuvre?
I have been intrigued by the autobiographical elements of many of Ann Patchett’s books. As she said ten years ago in an NPR interview about her novel, Commonwealth, “All of my books have been the same book. I write a book that is about a group of people who are pulled out of one family or situation and dropped into another one in which they are not familiar, and then I see how communities are formed.”
This pattern continues in Whistler. In it, Daphne has three fathers. Her birth father is a man who was meant to fish, not to father. Her second father is the beloved Eddie, whose tenure in the role was very brief. And her third father is Lucas, a man with whom the mother had two sons, Christopher and Matthew. Sisters Daphne and Leda take a far backseat in the final and most long-term marriage of their mother.
This definitely is an autobiographical element as we learn about Ann Patchett’s head count of fathers in a story she wrote for The New Yorker, “My Three Fathers.”
Just one more thing: Ann Patchett tells us in an interview with Newsbreak that the inspiration for the Daphne/Eddie relationship was not based upon one of her step fathers, but instead upon a dear friend, Jim Fox, who passed away recently reminding us that love can appear in many relationships, not just romantic ones.
If you want to learn more about the autobiographical elements of Ann Patchett’s book, please read my reviews of some of her other books:
*****
Click here to learn more about Whistler on Amazon.
*****
Click here to join the Book Lovers Club. I post about three dozen book reviews a year. If you would like to receive them as I write them, please join the Club.
*****
If you like my writing, I hope you will check out my new book, Chai on Life. It contains 36 slice-of-life stories ranging in topics from belly fat to Billy Joel. It is available wherever books are sold and on Amazon. There is even a companion journal for you to write the stories of your life.
Chai on Life is available in 3 formats: Hard Back, Kindle, and AudioBook.
*****
And one last thing! Amazon has named me an Influencer (!!!!) and invited me to open a Storefront. You will find lots of my favorite things there including fun gifts for people who love to read. Check it out!
Leave a Reply