If John Nickel had to narrow himself down to one mistake in his life, it would be that he didn't marry Marion Woodmoore as soon as he found out she was pregnant.
She was 18 and he was 25. They were sitting on the back steps of her parents' house, splitting a Coke, when she told him the results of the pregnancy test. Her face didn't have a worry on it. "It said I love you and you love me and all this is going to be fine." But it wouldn't be fine. "Taft," by Ann Patchett, explains why.
A graduate of the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, Ms. Patchett is a professor at Radcliffe College. Her first novel, "The Patron Saint of Liars," was chosen as a notable work of fiction by the American Library Association.
"Taft," Ms. Patchett's second novel, is warmly told. Its point is love's power to bind people together. The protagonist, John Nickel, a black man, tends bar in Memphis and daydreams about his 10-year-old son, Franklin, who lives in Miami with his mother:
"I saw my son's head," Nickel says after a phone conversation with Marion, the boy's mother. "It was oval-shaped. . . . His eyes were lighter than his skin. I thought about the shape of his eyes. I thought about his mouth which was wide and bright. I thought of every tooth that mouth contained, every one of them straight and hard and white as chalk the way new teeth are."
As Nickel explains it, he had not married Marion because of the way she looked at him when she told him she was pregnant: "It was something about the way she looked at me . . . like she knew I would never disappoint her, that made me want to disappoint her badly . . . It was her need of me that made me turn cruel."
After Franklin was born, Nickel fell in love with his son and wanted to marry Marion. But she, angry at his earlier refusal, said no. Soon Marion moved to Miami to establish herself in a nursing career. Nickel is left behind on Beale Street in Memphis.
Ms. Patchett suggests that Nickel's cruelty was caused by artistic quirkiness -- Nickel used to be a drummer -- and by immaturity. Yet that suggestion, while possible, is hard to believe, since Nickel seems almost a Christ figure.
The action of the story concerns his unselfish love for two fatherless kids. They're white kids. But racial issues, perhaps somewhat unrealistically, do not play a part in this story.
Bedraggled, 17-year-old Fay Taft comes to the bar asking for a job. Although he knows she's under age, Nickel pities Fay and hires her to work as a waitress -- partly because she reminds him of Marion, partly because she reminds him of his son, and partly because Nickel is such a caring person.
Her little face was like Marion's from way back, he says, "when I could read every thought that passed through her like it was typed up on her forehead." Later, watching Fay, Nickel aches out of paternal love.
Soon Carl, Fay's younger brother, begins hanging around the bar. At first he's taking drugs. Then he's selling them. Carl becomes this story's villain. Nickel, however, looks at Carl through a father's eyes.
Nickel's relationship with Fay and Carl grows very complicated. This relationship works for and against the story. The story provides a penetrating look at paternal love. But it takes that love -- and by extension all love -- to incredible extremes.
Nickel begins to see Fay as both a daughter and as a sexually attractive young woman. Soon he is obsessing over Fay just as VTC he has been obsessing over his son. Fay sees Nickel as a replacement for her dead father and tries to seduce him because of some twisted Oedipal yearnings.
Because of this intense relationship and because of his loneliness for his son, Nickel begins to imagine Taft, Fay's and Carl's father. Not only does he imagine him, he begins to relive experiences that Taft might have had with Carl and Fay, leading Nickel to treat Carl as if he were his overindulgent father. Astonishingly, he treats Fay as if he were beginning a love affair with her.
Ms. Patchett brings Nickel, Marion and Taft together for the novel's conclusion. Nickel experiences the full meaning of paternal love. That love presumably enables his consciousness to merge with Taft's, and he relives Taft's fatal heart attack, as if he were standing beside him. If readers believe love can have such power, that belief has more to do with the nature of love than with the workings of this novel.
Ms. Scharper teaches writing at Towson State University.
BOOK REVIEW
Title: "Taft"
Author: Ann Patchett
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Length, price: 305 pages, $21.95