Ann Patchett’s new novel, Whistler, brings Daphne Fuller face to face with the stepfather she has not seen in 40 years. Daphne, now a high school English teacher in Westchester County, meets Eddie Triplett at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the reunion lands as a long-delayed shock: the man who once vanished from her life is suddenly back in it.

That is why readers are looking at the book now. Patchett’s last novel, Tom Lake, arrived as a pandemic novel set on a cherry farm in Michigan and was carried in audiobook form by Meryl Streep. Whistler turns back toward a more polished, reunion-centered emotional setup, with Daphne’s husband, the aptly named True-Love Jonathan, standing beside a story that is built around what happens when the past walks back through the door.

Daphne is not simply reunited with Eddie; she is pulled into a memory that starts much earlier, with a winter night, a car accident, a lonely hill and a mean frost that broke their bond. Her mother had filed for divorce before Daphne and Eddie lost contact, and the novel returns to that break as if it were a wound that never quite closed. Patchett also gives Daphne one of the book’s most revealing lines: somewhere deep inside herself, in a place she could not access since she was 9, she had missed Eddie every day of her life.

That feeling gives the meeting at the museum its strange force. It reads almost illicitly easy, as if decades of silence can be crossed in a few steps among the galleries, yet the scene is shadowed by 40 years of lost time. Eddie is Daphne’s favorite stepfather, not a stranger, and not quite a father either, which makes the reunion feel both intimate and incomplete. The book keeps returning to that imbalance, the way a bond can survive in memory even when the people involved have lived entire adult lives without each other.

What happens next is the real question Patchett leaves hanging. Whistler has already shown that Daphne and Eddie can find each other again; the harder part is what their renewed closeness does to the lives they built in the meantime, and whether a reunion that feels so natural can ever fully answer for the years that made it necessary.