In Taft, Ann Patchett’s protagonist is about as different from herself as you can imagine. John Nickel is a middle-aged black male former blues drummer who now runs a bar. Then
A girl walked into the bar.
This teenager, Fay Taft, is white, thin, pale, and desperate for a job. Nickel hires her, but also seems to have inherited her younger brother Carl, still in school, who comes by each night to pick Fay up and take her home.
Over the next few chapters, some of the backstory of the Taft children emerges. They grew up in Patchett’s beloved Tennessee, but the death of their father forced the children and mother to move in with an aunt in Memphis. The children are used to working to keep bread on the table, since their mother fell apart after her husband’s death. Fay says proudly that they are saving to be able to return to Tennessee.
Carl, though, is not saving, something that is obvious to everyone around. Some days he is drug-addled, but apparently makes friends easily; more and more people start coming into the bar looking for him. The signals are clear; Carl is distributing drugs from the bar.
Meanwhile, Nickel’s own backstory emerges too. He has a child from a former relationship, but the child’s mother has moved to Miami and contact is now via intermittent phone calls. After rough periods in his teens and twenties, he now seems pretty stable. Fay, young enough to be his daughter, keeps making moves on him, and every time he drives her home there is intense tension; a large older black man with this gamine white child in a white neighbourhood? Intensely dangerous for Nickel, and the reader has a sense of dread throughout.
It wouldn’t be a good thing if someone was to open their curtains and see me out there [..] Whether or not a person was doing something wrong very rarely figured into these things. Being there in the first place, that’s trouble enough.
The book now alternates between sections set in present-day Memphis and the Taft household in Tennessee, as imagined by Nickel. It becomes clear that this is a book about fatherhood: Nickel’s imperfect relationship with his own 9-year-old son, and the Taft father’s relationship with his two children. There are parallels between Nickel’s fear that his son will get caught up in Miami gangs and Taft’s fears for his own children. Both families have financial worries too, though Nickel perhaps a little less so, as both he and his ex have stable jobs.
Unfortunately, this is where the book gets less compelling. Nickel is an excellent character, but the Taft household with its loving father somewhat less so. Theirs is a story of poverty and limitations, but it did not strike me as unusual or particularly well described. Looming over those sections is also the question of whether this was really their life, or whether this all exists in Nickel’s mind, but for me that was not a particularly interesting question.
There are many possible directions the book could have gone in, but the ones Patchett chose are edgy enough: the romance between the middle-aged black Nickel and the young white teenager, the drug situation that young Carl is in, the slow reveal of Carl’s personality, Fay’s somewhat mysterious adoration of Nickel, and over it all, race relations in Memphis.
Nickel’s voice, I thought, was excellently done.
I took the job managing Muddy’s at a time when things with Marion had come all the way around, from her doing everything to please me to me doing everything to please her. I said I’d stop playing and take on a regular job to show how steady I could be. I thought it was for just a while, like you always think something bad is for just a while. I didn’t take into account that I might lose my nerve, all those nights in a bar when I was watching instead f the one up there playing.
There is just enough description of the city and atmosphere to provide background without distracting from the characters who remain firmly in the foreground.
There was not one kind word to be said about Memphis that day. The pavement was the color of the sky, which was the color of the grass, which was the color of the Mississippi.
The ‘minor’ characters are each given plenty of space and personality. Nickel’s ex Marion is capable, resentful, angry. Ruth, Marion’s sister, is smart, envious of her sister.
Ruth was smooth. Everything she did came off looking natural.
Cyndi, the waitress at Muddy’s, used to be a lead hula dancer in Hawaii, and is tough as they come.
Cyndi tied a knot in one side of her skirt, jacking it to the top of her thigh and then giving anybody who looked at her hell about it.
Fay, though, who is one of the main characters, comes across as washed-out, as if painted in very light watercolor while all the rest are painted in oils.
There are likeable aspects of this book, as with anything Patchett writes, but overall I thought it was a distinct step below her best.
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