Taft: A Novel (P.S.) [Paperback]

Ann Patchett (Author)

Book Description

Series: P.S. | Publication Date: September 4, 2007

John Nickel is a black ex-jazz musician who only wants to be a good father. But when his son is taken away from him, he's left with nothing but the Memphis bar he manages. Then he hires Fay, a young white waitress, who has a volatile brother named Carl in tow. Nickel finds himself consumed with the idea of Taft—Fay and Carl's dead father—and begins to reconstruct the life of a man he never met. But his sympathies for these lost souls soon take him down a twisting path into the lives of strangers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Following her well-received debut, The Patron Saint of Liars , Patchett convincingly portrays a bar manager's conflicted feelings for a teenage waitress in this tale of fatherhood and unfulfilled dreams. Narrator John Nickel runs a bar called Muddy's on Memphis's Beale Street. He took the job to help provide for his lover, Marion, and their 10-year-old son, Franklin, who have since moved away, leaving him concerned that the boy lacks paternal guidance. When 17-year-old Fay Taft shows up at Muddy's, lies about her age and asks for a job, Nickel is touched by her neediness and hires her. But he doesn't bargain on her growing desire for him, or on her drug-dealer brother, who brings sleazy clients to the bar. Another complication is the issue of race--Fay is white, Nickel black--but the author concentrates on the color-blind moral problems that any family faces. As Nickel contemplates his own predicaments, he imagines scenes of the Tafts in a stable home before their father died. His sincere sense of responsibility--to his son, to Fay, even to Fay's no-good brother--is conveyed with visceral power, although the hard-boiled dialogue often resembles parody. Patchett's characters may include tough cookies with hearts of gold, but the novel is at its best when she mutes the melodrama and focuses on basic moral issues.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This second novel from the author of the well-received The Patron Saint of Liars (LJ 4/1/92) is narrated by John Nickel, an ex-drummer who manages a Memphis bar that is a sort of anti-Cheers. He is also African American, a fact you can soon forget. For one thing, in Patchett's Tennessee, everyone, regardless of age, race, sex, class, or locale, speaks nearly the same flat language. John is obsessed with his young son, who has moved to Miami with John's ex-girlfriend, and his longing for the child is the pivotal and most convincing aspect of the novel. In the meantime, 18-year-old Faye Taft enters the bar and John's life, with her drug-addicted brother in tow. They're running from a family destroyed by their father's sudden death. Strangely, John starts imagining the Taft family before the death in passages that are vividly realized yet so disassociated from the narrator that you begin to wonder if he is receiving ESP transmissions. Patchett is a fine writer, but here we are most aware of her ideas for the novel-the fiction itself rarely takes off. For large public library collections.
Brian Kenney, Brooklyn P.L.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (September 4, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061339229
• ISBN-13: 978-0061339226
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #941,346 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ann Patchett was born in Los Angeles in 1963 and raised in Nashville. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 1990, she won a residential fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars. It was named a New York Times Notable Book for 1992. In 1993, she received a Bunting Fellowship from the Mary Ingrahm Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. Patchett's second novel, Taft, was awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best work of fiction in 1994. Her third novel, The Magician's Assistant, was short-listed for England's Orange Prize and earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship.Her next novel, Bel Canto, won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in 2002, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was named the Book Sense Book of the Year. It sold more than a million copies in the United States and has been translated into thirty languages. In 2004, Patchett published Truth & Beauty, a memoir of her friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy. It was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Entertainment Weekly. Truth & Beauty was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Alex Award from the American Library Association. She was also the editor of Best American Short Stories 2006.Patchett has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times magazine, Harper's, The Atlantic,The Washington Post, Gourmet, and Vogue. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband, Karl VanDevender.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Patchett's weakest novel is still a good read, August 15, 2005

By 

D'Anne Witkowski (Michigan, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Taft: A Novel (Paperback)

It's true that Taft is not Ann Patchett's strongest work - and even she's admitted that Taft is not the best title for a book. However, it speaks well for her that Taft is still a good read. It's a story primarily of fatherhood and loyalty - however misplaced. I've read all but one of Patchett's books, starting with the non-fiction Truth and Beauty, and think that Patchett is one of the best novelists writing today. Patchett has a gift for language and is poetic without being thick. She also knows how to weave a story and her characters, even those that aren't as well fleshed out, stay with you long after you've read the last page. If you've never read a book by Patchett, Bel Canto and The Magician's Assistant are better than Taft, but if you've read her other works and want an engaging page turner that's far better than average, Taft is a worthy read. In fact, even if a reader started with Taft, they'd get a good enough taste of Patchett's talents that they'd seek out her other works and be even more impressed with whatever Patchett book found its way into their hands next.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Disarming simplicity, December 26, 2005

By 

Roger Brunyate "reader/writer/musician" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Taft: A Novel (Paperback)

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 uses literal but fantastic magic tricks for the same purpose, but the device is more seamlessly incorportated into the fabric of the novel. Surely one of the great reasons for her success with BEL CANTO is her ability to parlay a real-life event (the capture of a South American embassy by terrorists) into an almost magical suspension of time.

But the real value of TAFT is its pay-off. The beauty of its ending--not too neat but deeply satisfying--kept me awake for most of the night after I finished it. The mainly internal action of the book culminates in a climactic event which at last reminds Nickel of his true priorities. In the last two chapters, Patchett's handling of the strand of magic reconstruction is particularly impressive, finally linking the two characters of Taft and Nickel, and bringing about another of those gentle miracles that one has come to associate with her work.

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Very Disappointing, August 1, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Taft: A Novel (Paperback)

I just loved Ann Patchett's wonderful writing and story in her recent novel BEL CANTO, so decided to read her other three books, starting with the first one, so that I could see the progression. Although it wasn't on the same level as Bel Canto (my favorite), I really liked Patchett's first novel, THE PATRON SAINT OF LIARS. Wonderful characters and voice & things to think about.

But her second book, TAFT, was a real disappointment. The characters are flat and I couldn't connect with any of them, was particularly disgusted with the young Fay, and just couldn't understand the much older John Nickel's fascination with her, his compulsion to take her wherever she asks, do almost anything she wants, to the extent of always protecting her brother Carl. She just isn't likeable, is embarrassingly naive, a weak character (not that I liked Carl any better). Yes, we are told it's because she's needy and John wants to be protective. But 'telling' doesn't make it believable.

I felt there was a hazy screen in front of me the whole time I was reading Taft--which by the way is yes, a real 'lightweight,' nothing much to think about in it--that there wasn't much story there, let alone feeling for any of the characters. For me, when a book is really well-written, I can't get enough of every detail, like to savor them, and that was certainly missing for me here (plus there is little detail in this novel anyway--it's pretty sparse). I did think that Patchett had an original idea in trying to incorporate John Nickel's imagined 'story' of Taft (Fay and Carl's deceased father), and it almost worked, but something seemed missing to weave these parts into the novel seamlessly--they felt choppy and often out of place.

The book meanders until near the end (which I wouldn't mind if I had been immersed in its characters or story), and then it picks up--and then bam, ends pretty quickly. I did like the last couple of reminiscences of Taft woven in at the end and the fact that Patchett didn't end with his death, but went back to an earlier time--it did bring together some of the theme strands about protecting those we love. But it left me with little feeling or little to think about also. Nor did the book bring much closure with it, though I just didn't care, at that point.

So, for me, this book just didn't jell, and I wouldn't recommend it. I haven't read Patchett's third book yet (MAGICIAN'S ASSISTANT), but would certainly recommend her first and fourth over this novel. I'm hesitating between two stars--because I didn't find much to like in this novel--and three stars, because Patchett has such potential, is an intelligent, literary writer; so maybe I'll say two and a half.