Taft
A Novel
by Ann Patchett
List Price: $12.95
Pages: 256
Format: Hardcover/Paperback
ISBN: 0060540761
Publisher: Perennial
Ann Patchett is the author of three previous novels, The Patron Saint of Liars, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Taft, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize; and The Magician's Assistant, which earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994. She is also a recipient of the Nashville Banner Tennessee Writer of the Year Award. Patchett has written for many publications, including New York Times Magazine, Chicago Tribune, Village Voice, GQ, Elle, Gourmet and Vogue.
Patchett attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she took writing classes with Alan Gurganus, Russell Banks, and Grace Paley. While an undergraduate, she sold her first story to the Paris Review. Patchett then went on to attend the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, and in 1990, she won a residential fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Here she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, which was awarded a James A. Michner/Copernicus Award for a book in progress. The Patron Saint of Liars was adapted into a TV movie for CBS in 1997, and Patchett wrote the screenplay for Taft, which has been optioned by Morgan Freeman for a feature film.
Patchett lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
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Elizabeth McCracken's collection of short stories, Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry, was an American Library Association Notable Book of 1993. Her first novel, The Giant's House, was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award and won the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize, a Salon Book Award, and the Vursell Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has worked in public libraries off and on since age fifteen.
EM: How much time did you give to worrying over choosing a narrator who is so different from your statistical profile? Did any one thing--race, parental status, age, gender--give you any more pause than the others? Do you think there are any pitfalls--inside the book, and outside--of being a white, educated, professional woman writing in the voice of a black, self-educated, workingclass man? Did you do anything in particular to get yourself inside his head?
AP: When I started this book, I knew I wanted to write about two families, one white and one black, that come together in the contemporary urban south. I knew that I didn't want their story to be one primarily about race. When I had all my characters and my story, I set about to find a narrator. It's a little like a casting call. I tried out different characters, started the book from different points of view. I never intended John to be the narrator, but in the final analysis he was the most reliable person I had to work with. I did not set out to have a black male narrator. He was simply the character who was my best bet. As far as which aspect of his character was most difficult for me in terms of being something that was outside of myself, my answer is that if you're writing a character that isn't you, it isn't you. Once you step outside yourself, you're out there, you can be anybody. What stops people is not having characters who are a far stretch, but having narrators who are. I think the secret is to only speak for one person at a time. I was not trying to represent black men, black fathers. I was only trying to represent John Nickel.
EM: Fay says that she can't think of anything worth dying for; John says that he can think of half a dozen things. What are those things, other than Franklin? Also: throughout the book, there is the constant shadow of violence, injury, possible death, possible jail time. John thinks constantly of the threats of the world: not only what might happen to his son, but what might happen to any one of them. I wonder how much of this is John's own nature, and the nature of the world he lives in. For all the violence in the book, especially at the end, even more is threatened.
AP: When John says he can think of a half a dozen things worth dying for, I think he's not talking about specific things but a general sense of honor. He is a heroic character, which is why I have such affection for him. He would die trying to do the right thing, probably without thinking about it too much. He is a character who, in spite of himself at times, becomes deeply involved with people. As for the violence in the book and John's awareness of that violence, that comes from my perception of what it must be like to be a black man in the south (or anywhere in this country, for that matter). This is a time when I have to say, of course I've never experienced this, but growing up in Nashville in the late sixties, I remember the Klan stood out on Music Row every weekend with their white hoods and German shepherds. It made a deep impression on me. John understands that the world is a dangerous place in a way that Franklin and Fay and Carl absolutely do not understand. The intersection of one character's understanding and another character's naivete is a fearsome and tender place. It is a perfect place to set a novel.
EM: You've published three novels, two in first person, and one close third. Has one been more difficult than another? Taft is in some ways the most traditional first-person narrative, but it, too, has the third-person sections. So okay, here's the question: What comes first, the idea for the novel, or the narrator? In this case, how much did you know about the novel before you chose John Nickel to tell the story? When did you first think about the sections about Taft himself? What do you think is the connection between Nickel's voice and these sections?
AP: The sad truth is I don't remember the answer to most of this question. I'll give you what I can: the idea for the novel comes first, then the narrative structure. It's a very difficult decision to make. When I finally settled on John as the narrator, that book took off because he was a strong character. He had a very self-assured voice that I could follow. Other characters are too weak to support first-person narratives. In the scenes in which John imagines the life of Taft, he is taking on the role of writer, he is creating a character in hopes of answering the questions he has, not just about Fay and Carl, but about the nature of fatherhood and the ability to protect your children. For me it was a little bit like working in a hall of mirrors: I imagine a character who imagines a character.
EM: You also write a great deal of nonfiction personal magazine work: How is creating a first-person narrator different from writing something in "your own" voice?
AP: Magazine work isn't in your own voice. It's in the magazines' voice. They have a style and the writer fits into it in some way. I use details about my life to make a point in a magazine piece, but I never really reveal anything. People like to think they're finding out something about you, but the facts are so random that I never feel like they amount to anything. I've tried to keep a journal before and have always failed miserably. I find writing in my own voice, just for myself, very awkward.
EM: What aspects of this book came first? Characters, setting, narrator? How much do you need to know about a book--or this book, in particular--before you can start writing it? How much changes from the time you first think about it as a novel, and the writing of your first sentence?
AP: Everyone works differently. For me, writing is like planning a long car trip: if I don't have a map, I don't get there. I spend a long time thinking up a novel before I ever start to write it. It usually starts with a scene. In this case, I was in a bar in Memphis one night talking to a drummer in a band. The whole conversation probably lasted three minutes, but I kept wondering about this person, who he was, what his life was like. I spend a long time thinking about my characters and making up a story for them to live in. The basic structure I have by the time I sit down to start the novel is fairly true to the one I have when I finish, but things do change along the way. For example, I thought Fay and John would fall in love and have a real romance, but once I got to know him I found that he was too mature and complicated a person to be interested in her in that way (though not so mature that he wasn't tempted). The last thing I do before I start to write the book is figure out the narrative structure and name the characters. I have a terrible time naming people. They are completely shaped in my head, but nameless for the longest time.
EM: And who wrote your first sentence, anyhow? It's brilliant, yet somehow familiar.
AP: Why not tell them the truth? This is the stuff they really want to know. It was YOU, YOU did it! We were walking down the street in Provincetown on a freezing Sunday morning, passing our regular bar, when you said, "I've always wanted to write a story that began ÔA dog ran into the bar.'" I immediately saw the sentence for its brilliance and wanted it for my own. Then you went ahead, selfishly, and used it in a short story, "The Bar of Our Recent Unhappiness." Several years later, when I wrote Taft, I decided to pinch the line (I asked). Still, that opening sentence got so much praise in reviews that in the end I felt a little cheap about the whole thing.
EM: What do you think Fay really wants from Nickel (maybe that's a study question)? Is this love? Is there any real, deep, requited love in the book, except for Franklin and Nickel?
AP: I can answer the first half. I don't think Fay knows what she wants. I think that's a big part of what the book is about. She's right on the edge between being an adult and a child. One minute she wants John to act as her father; the next minute she wants to seduce him. In short, she wants his love; she just doesn't know what form she wants it to take. I like to think that just outside the ending of the book, John and Marion will fall in love again in a deep way. That may just be wishful thinking on my part.
EM: How did the love for the various characters change as you wrote the book? Did characters end up closer, or farther away?
AP: The character that surprised me the most was Ruth. There was no Ruth in the beginning. John goes over to his in-laws' house for dinner and out comes a totally unplanned sister just to break up the evening. She was so sexy and interesting that she kept turning up and turning up. I think Ruth got a bad deal in the book. I think everyone should have been in love with her.
EM: What surprised you in the writing of this book? Did one character change more than others?
AP: I may be getting repetitious now, but what surprised me is John being the narrator. I also thought Fay and Carl's mother would have a big role (at first I thought she would be the narrator), but her character wound up being so weak and depressed that she practically slipped out of the novel altogether.
EM: Who is your favorite character? What's your favorite part? (Or, if you'd rather, what part of this book are you proudest of?) What part was--for whatever reason--the hardest to write?
AP: John is my favorite character, not just in this novel, but in anything I've written. That's why Taft is my favorite book. He's a moral person who is constantly struggling. He wants to be distant and yet keeps getting dragged into people's lives because it is the nature of his good heart. I don't know what the hardest part to write was, but the easiest parts were the "Taft" scenes. They were completely out of time and outside of the plot, so they could be about anything I wanted. In a way, this allowed me to concentrate more on the writing in those scenes, and I think they're more beautiful than the rest of the book.
EM: How did you write this book? How long did it take?
AP: I thought about this book for about a year before I wrote a word of it. Once I finally got going, by which I mean stopped writing openings that I kept throwing away, it took me about six months to write. I wrote it in Montana and Wyoming in the winter. There weren't many distractions.
Excerpted from Taft © Copyright 2008 by Ann Patchett. Reprinted with permission by Perennial. All rights reserved.
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