Taft

This story effortlessly unfolds, patiently, without pretension: young Fay, yearning for her father, falls in love with Nickel, a middle-age man yearning for his son. The more Fay asks of Nickel, the more Nickel is drawn into the destructive elements of Fay's family, until tragedy strikes. Nothing about the story feels artificial. Woven through the narrative is the story of Fay's father, a humble man with extraordinary empathy and inner strength who nevertheless suffers an early death. His spirit presides over the paths of the other characters as they struggle to find stability. This compelling story is beautifully wrought and evocative. A wakeful opiate.

In a book that is set far away in place, character, and circumstance from her justly celebrated novel "Bel Canto," Patchett has crafted a story that reveals once again that the extraordinary lies just beneath the surface in even the most "ordinary" of people. Nickel, the black manager of a Memphis bar and a former jazz musician struggling with his own losses, hires Fay, a white teenage girl, as a waitress. Against his better judgment he becomes increasingly involved in her life and that of her younger brother Carl, a troubled kid who spells trouble for Nickel. As the characters try to make sense of their own circumstances and find a way to move forward with their lives, dangerous collisions become inevitable and choices must be made. Hovering over everything is Taft, the dead father of Fay and Carl, whose life and experience could not be more different than that of Nickel, and who haunts both Nickel's and the reader's thoughts. The book is well-plotted, with enough suspense to keep the reader turning the pages, as Ms. Patchett performs her own magic, showing us that nothing, and no one, is simple.

One characteristic of Ann Patchett's work is her simplicity. All her works concentrate on the emotional interrelationships of a small group of people, often in an enclosed community and/or over a short space of time. This is seen most clearly in her masterpiece BEL CANTO, but TAFT also displays a similarly beguiling compression. There are scarcely a dozen character, and the whole action takes place within a few miles of the small Memphis bar managed by the narrator-hero John Nickel. In fact, very little actually happens until the very end, though the emotional turmoil of affections and loyalties is quite intense. What some other readers saw as a weakness, I treasure as one of the book's greatest strengths. Nickel, a former blues musician turned bar manager, yearns for his son whom his estranged lover, the child's mother, has taken out of state. In some kind of emotional compensation, he finds himself involved in the lives of a fatherless young waitress who comes to work in his bar and her younger brother. Nickel is not a wholly admirable character, though he strives to do the right thing. Patchett has caught especially well the manner in which emotional trauma can ricochet until a person no longer knows his true feelings or even his own best interest. Looking at her innocent girl-next-door face on her publicity photo, it is hard to imagine that she has been there, felt that, but this book must surely have been born out of experience. Presumably outside her experience, though, is the specific life of her African-American narrator, John Nickel. I was greatly impressed by her daring in writing about such a world from the inside, but I have to admit that some of the language seems borrowed from hard-boiled fiction rather from life, and I cannot judge whether she captures the particular world of the blues musician. I felt very confident, though, in her description of the work of the bar. And, where it really matters, in the workings of the human heart, Patchett is admirably color-blind and has close to perfect pitch. The most unusual technical aspect of this book, which gives it its title, is Nickel's imagined reconstructions of the relation between the two young people and their dead father, Taft. These episodes become increasingly detailed as the book goes on, and form a parallel strand in the narrative, almost as though Nickel were there himself, engaging in a form of time-traveling. It is clear that Nickel comes to identify with his imagined Taft, whom he uses as a sort of touchstone of fatherhood. Some readers may have been puzzled by this, but I liked it for its ability to reflect on the soul of the central character (Nickel, not Taft, who in a real sense does not exist). All Patchett's novels, with the partial exception of her first, seem to require some kind of artifice to bring out the feelings of her characters in their purest form. In TAFT, this artifice is perhaps too obvious, a mere authorial device. In THE MAGICIAN'S ASSISTANT, she u

Ann Patchett is an intelligent and gifted writer with a knack for making characters come to life. I've read all four of her novels and enjoyed each one, but this is my favorite. She establishes John Nickel from the first page as a credible and appealing narrator. If you met this guy in real life, you'd want to buy him a drink and listen to him talk. He makes mistakes but not excuses. There is a generosity of spirit in the narrator and the novel both that makes the book ultimately uplifting. Tragedy and betrayal occur, but healing and connection can follow. A lovely book.

For me a fine author is one who takes me places I would not ordinarily have chosen to go. I have learned to trust Patchett in that way. When I have read the plot outlines for her books, it has taken a leap of faith to plunge into them, the situations have seemed too off-beat for my conservative imagination. But I have learned to trust Patchett and I will always go with her. Taft is this kind of book. The fanciful awarenesses are atmospheric for me, not weird, as in other books with such devices. Her characters have flaws, but often great nobility. She is a fine author, and we are fortunate if she continues to share her gift with us.