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FICTION/Patchett, Ann
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Subjects
Published
New York : Ballantine Books 1999.
Language
English
Main Author
Ann Patchett (-)
Edition
1st Ballantine Books trade paperback ed
Physical Description
246 p. ; 21 cm
ISBN
9780061339226
9780345433534
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

This is a modest yet intricate story about a man's longing to be a father to his son. After his girlfriend and son leave him and move to Miami, John Nickel, a black man, becomes involved in the lives of Carl and Fay Taft, two white teenagers who have recently experienced the death of their father, Taft. Nickel, a bar manager and ex-blues drummer, hires Fay to work as a waitress in his bar. As he becomes more deeply involved in their lives and caught up in their problems (Carl is a drug-dealer/user, and Fay has become infatuated with Nickel), he yearns more keenly than ever to be reunited with his son. The story unfolds through the eyes of Nickel. We see the events surrounding the end of his relationship with his girlfriend interwoven with the death of Taft. Ultimately, the issues that John Nickel encounters (race, parenting, despair) foster his emotional growth and offer hope for all involved. This compassionate and deeply moving second novel by the author of The Patron Saint of Liars deals swiftly and intelligently with the mystery of human behavior. ~--Kathleen Hughes

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

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. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The author of The Patron Saint of Liars (1992) takes risks in her absorbing second novel--about a middle-aged black man who runs a blues club in Memphis--which has a good beginning and end but a static middle. A young white woman named Fay Taft from east Tennessee comes into the club one night looking for a job. When she begins waiting tables there, her brother Carl--who is involved in drugs--also starts hanging around. They have a strange intimacy with the narrator, John Nickel; he feels protective of them, partly because he is far from his own son, Franklin, who is living in Miami with his mother, Marion. Fay reveals that she and Carl moved to Memphis after their father's death, and John begins imagining the life of this man (whom he always thinks of simply as ``Taft'') in passages that alternate with the main plot. Although the narrator's slow, laid-back cadences are well-realized, the story hits a lull before emerging into a more active ending. The relationship between Fay and John is never completely clear; when she reveals that she is about to turn 18 and proposes marriage, it is more of a shock than it ought to be. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that John, a former musician who recognizes immediately that Fay's brother is using drugs and can differentiate between his various highs, would not realize that Carl might be a dealer until someone else mentions it to him. On the other hand, memories of his early days with Marion, and the admission that not marrying her when she was 18 and pregnant was a far-reaching error, are remarkably straightforward and honest. A strikingly original and thoroughly conceived bluesy voice, though the story it tells has some holes in logic. (Author tour)

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Taft A Novel Chapter One A girl walked into the bar. I was hunched over, trying to open a box of Dewar's without my knife. I'd bent the blade the day before prying loose an old metal ice cube tray that had frozen solid to the side of the freezer. The box was sealed up tight with strapping tape. She waited there quietly, not asking for anything, not leaning on the bar. She held her purse with two hands and stood still. I could see her sort of upside down from where I was. She was on the small side, pale and average-looking, with a big puffy winter jacket on over her dress. I watched her look around at the stuff up on the walls, black-and-white pictures of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf in cracked frames, a knocked-off street sign from Elvis Presley Boulevard, the mounted head of a skinny deer. She pretended to be interested in things so she didn't have to look at anybody. Not that there was much of anybody to look at. It was February, Wednesday, four in the afternoon. The dead time of the deadest season, which is why I wasn't in any rush. The tape was making me crazy. Before I even got the box open, Cyndi walked out of the kitchen and headed right for her. "What can I get you?" Cyndi said. Then I straightened up because the girl in the puffy coat wasn't, of a drinking age. She was eighteen, nineteen. Could've been younger. When you'd spent as much of your life in a bar as I had, you recognized those things right away. Cyndi, she knew nothing about bars other than getting drunk in them. She was just a girl herself, and girls were no judge of girls. "Get her a Coke," I said, and headed over to them. But the girl put up her hand and I stopped walking just like that. It was a funny thing. "I'm here about a job," she said. Well, then I could see it. The way she was overdressed. The way she didn't seem to be meeting anybody but didn't seem like she was there to pick anybody up either. We got plenty of girls through there. We got the college girls looking to make money to pay the bills who wound up trying to read their books by the little light next to the cash register when things were slow, and then we got the other kind, older ones who liked the music and liked to pour themselves shots behind the bar. Those were the ones who walked out in the middle of their shift with some strange customer on a Friday night when the place was packed and then showed up three days later, asking could they have their job back. Those were the ones the regulars always took to. "You over at the college?" I said, and Cyndi looked at her hard because she didn't like the college girls. The girl nodded. A piece of her straight hair slipped out from behind her ear and she tucked it back into place. "How old are you?" I said. "Twenty," she said, so quickly that I figured she'd practiced saying it in front of a mirror. Twenty. Twenty. Twenty. She didn't look twenty, but I would bet money that her ID was fake. It didn't so much matter in Tennessee. Seventeen could serve a drink as long as they kept it clear of their mouths. "Any restaurant experience?" I looked at her hard, trying to tell her age from her face. "Ever work in a bar?" I was out of those employment forms. I made a mental note to order a box. She nodded again. Quiet girl. "Not around here, though. I'm not from around here." Cyndi and I stood there on the other side of the bar, waiting for her to say where she was from but she didn't. "Where?" Cyndi said. "East," the girl said, even though that could mean anywhere from Nashville to China. East was the world if you went with it far enough. I didn't think she was trying to be difficult on purpose. The way she stood so straight and kept her voice low and respectful, it was plain that she needed the job. I liked her, though I didn't have a reason. Even when I just saw her standing there, when she put up her hand and for a second it felt like something personal. I liked this girl. "What's your name?" I asked. "Fay Taft," she said. "Like the president?" "What?" "William Howard Taft." "Oh, no," she said. "My father tried to trace that back once, but he didn't come up with anything. I don't think our Tafts ever met their Tafts." "Only president ever to be chief justice on the Supreme Court." I had no idea why I knew this. Some facts stick with you for no reason. "He was fat," she said in a sorry voice, like there could be nothing sadder than fat. "I always felt kind of bad for him." Not very many people who come into bars can talk to you about dead presidents. I told her she had a job. Cyndi turned on her heel as soon as I'd said it. Cyndi wanted two shifts a day, seven days a week. She wanted every tip from every table in the place. She saw no need in the world for a waitress other than herself. "Come back tomorrow," I told Fay, not looking over my shoulder at Cyndi, who she was straining to see. "Come in before lunch. We'll get you started." She wasn't saying a word. She looked too scared to take a deep breath. "That okay?" I asked. "School," she said softly, like the very word would be the end of it. No bar, no job ... Taft A Novel . Copyright © by Ann Patchett. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Taft by Ann Patchett All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.