This article is taken from the July 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
The American literary establishment has had a sex change. Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett are the new royalty — as prominent, praised and prolific as Philip Roth and John Updike were 30 years ago. Unlike their male counterparts, Strout and Patchett are character writers first and foremost, not ostentatious stylists, which probably says something about our era.
Patchett’s new novel Whistler comes to us from across the Atlantic, supported by a wave of high but not uniform praise. (It is a career marker for every fully-risen novelist that they start to face more critical attention.)
It focuses on the family — the novelist’s endless resource: everyone has one, everyone can relate — and it starts with an expert tease, reminiscent of Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now. “Old guy. Near the exit sign,” whispers the narrator’s husband to her as they wander the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “He looks at you whenever you’re not looking.”
The narrator is Daphne, a teacher; and, though she dismisses her husband Jonathan’s warning, it turns out she is being followed. Her stalker introduces himself: Eddie Triplett, editor at a New York publishing house … and her stepfather. If it seems implausible that she didn’t recognise him, well, they haven’t seen one another in over 40 years, and “the marriage was so brief we were barely his stepdaughters”.
Yet seeing Eddie strikes something deeper in Daphne, as she breaks down in tears. “I hadn’t known there was something in me to break, but there was, and break it did.” Why? After all, “the past had happened such a long time ago, and [ … ] it seemed we had all come out fine”.
Not so fast. The past is never dead; it is not even past. Daphne and Eddie had a near-death experience together, when she was nine and he took her stargazing in the countryside — but his car left the road and “pitched into the fathomless darkness below”. The flashback scene is a masterclass in an experienced writer showing what she can do, as the car plummets quickly but slowly. “There was no time to correct the situation but a seemingly infinite amount of time to consider it.” The vivid, careful writing here is the stuff that novels are made of.
Clearly Eddie and Daphne survived, but her mother divorced him soon after: “He takes you out and almost kills you,” she tells her daughter. But like everything in families, it’s more complicated than that, and the book explores what really happened.
Patchett is very good on the balances and imbalances of family life, where one dispute opens another, often entirely unrelated. Adding a frisson is the fact that Daphne’s husband is 17 years her senior, almost as old as Eddie, and he wonders if there is something else happening in Daphne’s enthusiasm for her rediscovered stepdad.
There are a few narrative reversals along the way and an appropriately elegiac feel toward the end, as befits a novel where so many of the characters are in old age. (Suddenly, the opening line that Eddie in the museum was “near the exit sign” starts to look like foreshadowing.) And there are quotable nuggets sprinkled throughout. “How do we talk about death but to lie about it?” Daphne asks late on.
In one sense Whistler is satisfying and complete, and there’s little doubt that at every stage it is exactly what Patchett intended it to be. Yet this very smoothness, the professionalism, gives it a glossy exterior that doesn’t quite fit the turbulent dynamics it describes. It doesn’t stand out or strike the reader hard between the eyes or into the heart. It is, in the end, as good as it needs to be and no better — which may be one explanation for Patchett’s success.
Michael Bracewell started writing in the late 1980s as part of what we might call the post-Amis generation: his novels were urban, stylish, contemporary in their culture and not overly concerned with plot. (However, his 1995 novel Saint Rachel contained a marmalade-dropper of a twist, albeit one that embedded the book firmly in its era.)
After the turn of the millennium, he abandoned fiction and focused on his writing on art and music; but, three years ago, he published a new novel, aptly titled Unfinished Business. Now we get a novel that seems to combine his interests in music and the sleazy, gilded 1980s, through the fictional account of one man’s discovery of the groundbreaking indie band The Smiths.
As an admirer of both Mr Bracewell and Messrs Smith, this sounded like catnip to me, and even to describe the band to newcomers as a “groundbreaking indie band” seems inadequate. Bracewell’s task is to do better than me, and he achieves this effortlessly. The structure of the book is the narrator’s imagined encounter with the French actress Carole Bouquet in London, where they discuss films and, as they walk the West End, he points out a building: “And next door is the room where I first heard The Smiths.” Bouquet: “Non!”
And so we get the descriptions that Bracewell has presumably been marinating for 40 years, starting with Morrissey’s “so aloof, yet so intimate” lyrics and voice “that promised remonstration as a full-time job”, Marr’s “ghostly dance-hall tremolo and barrelling mystery-train rockabilly” and, overall, the first album’s “slow songs sung over fast and furious music”. The “life-changing visitation” was a contrast to the narrator’s jobs at the time, in “a succession of obscure government offices, all housed in airless buildings in West London”. (A very Bracewell detail.)
He captures perfectly the songs’ ambiguity, “a strange sexual theatre, the products of which were never advertised” and the essence of Manchester they encapsulated, of “a north-western England mired in making do and getting by, that is also making nothing and getting nowhere.” As the most bookish of lyricists, Morrissey’s literary kinships, from Beckett to Orwell to Waugh, are nicely outlined.
But no group of such towering cult status is anything without its fans, and The Smiths were the “house band for those picked last for the team” — their fevered devotion explained because “a lot of people brought their unwanted love to The Smiths”. Concentrating mainly on the band’s first album, where the production was bumpy but their power at its rawest, provides a handy analogy for the listener’s own developing tastes.
Is this a book that will appeal to non-fans of The Smiths? Is it even a novel at all or merely an elegantly framed essay? Such category questions seem futile in the face of Bracewell’s charm offensive.
Also, writing a novel fixed in the past, Bracewell has no need to fast-forward and reflect on Morrissey’s fallen status both artistically and personally. Here there is only a scintillating future. And if the exquisitely turned phrases one after another get a bit too much occasionally, then that is only reflective of his subject.
The Japanese writer Osamu Dazai has had a busy afterlife. His best-known novel No Longer Human — published in 1948 shortly before his suicide — has become a surprise bestseller in recent years. Now, publishers are clamouring to give us more of his work.
The story collection Schoolgirl is a perfect introduction. The tales within — all told by female narrators — are stark and vivid. The title novella, which shot Dazai to fame when it was published in 1939, is told by a schoolgirl who vacillates between childish excitement and adult gloom, struggling with the changes from her adolescence against the strictures of Japanese society. “I secretly love the unusual parts of myself [ … ], but I’m scared of manifesting themselves as something indisputably mine.”
There’s a Wildean flair here (“Of course, beauty should be contentless. Pure beauty is meaningless and amoral”) that presents Dazai as a gateway between the formal masters of the earlier twentieth century — Kawabata, Sõseki — and the modern voices from Mishima to Murata.
In the other stories, we see similar themes: women who struggle to fit in. In “Skin and Psyche”, both the narrator and her husband were making do when they married: after all, as she bluntly puts it, “at twenty-eight, I’m practically middle-aged, and what’s more, there’s this face of mine to consider”. In “Lantern”, a woman falls in love with a younger man, then, in desperation to show her love, she steals a swimsuit for him and ends up in police custody.
There’s almost an exuberance in the self-loathing that some of these characters show and an austere comedy in the fixes their emotions drive them into. Not that the men fare better: “What a useless husband,” concludes the narrator of “8 December” — the story named for the date of the attack on Pearl Harbour — even as she feels “a sense of gratitude for the nation of Japan move through me”.
From nationalism to personal psychodrama, Schoolgirl has everything in a small package. If your conception of Japanese fiction is cosy crime and cats, then prepare to have your eyes opened.
