Taft.

Just recorded my one Baseball Today podcast of the week – I’ve had to skip two due to early-morning flights. Also, Thursday’s chat will take place after I get off the College Baseball Live set, at either 7:30 pm or 8 pm EDT, because (weather permitting) I’m seeing Javier Baez play at the usual chat time.

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In an afterword to her second novel, Taft, Ann Patchett laments its status as her least-known novel even though she’s extremely fond of it, a situation she credits to everything from the title (admittedly not the optimal choice) to the way it was superseded by her later works, notably the mesmerizing Bel Canto. But Taft showcases Patchett’s skill for characterization as well as her beautiful yet readable prose, and compares favorably to the novels that came before and after it. (Her most recent novel, Run, was by far her worst effort.)

The Taft of the book’s title is already dead before the book begins. Ray Taft was a husband and father of two in a rural town in eastern Tennessee who died of a heart attack, leaving his family emotionally adrift and buried in bills. His wife, daughter, and son move to Memphis to live with their wealthy aunt and uncle, but the daughter, Fay, chooses to work and ends up in the bar run by the narrator, former blues drummer John Nickel, a black man more than ten years her senior. Nickel gives Fay a job and ends up enmeshed in her new domestic drama, largely revolving around her brother, Carl, for whom the loss of his father has meant the loss of an anchor and a descent into increasingly serious trouble. Meanwhile, Nickel himself is grappling with his own loss, as his ex-girlfriend has moved to Miami with their seven-year-old son, Franklin, leaving him with limited contact with his only child.

The present-day stories of Fay/Carl and Nickel/Franklin are interrupted by what are either flashbacks or Nickel’s own interpolations of Taft’s story, including the switch in Fay’s and Carl’s personalities after their father’s death and a poignant scene where Taft interacts with a local boy selling candy door to door to raise money for his school science class.

If there’s a reason for Taft‘s relative lack of success, it might be that the book seemed less substantial than her other novels. The Patron Saint of Liars revolved around a terribly broken woman and the daughter she is destined to disappoint. The Magician’s Assistant is about a woman dealing with the death of her longtime business partner, who could never requite her affection for him. Bel Canto is a masterpiece, a story of hostages and terrorists in a Latin American embassy where, over time, the barrier between captor and captive begins to break down. Major things happen in Taft – if you’re familiar with Chekhov, you’ll see the biggest event coming a mile away – but the results aren’t that different from what preceded the big stuff. Characters aren’t much changed, and little is resolved at the end of the book. I was fine with that because it’s a well-written slice of life, but if you like your novels to come with firm beginnings and ends and a cherry on top, this isn’t the book for you. And that’s fine too.

Next up: Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories. She might have been the original Debbie Downer.