Last summer, HarperCollins sent Ann Patchett as far north as Chicago and as far west as Seattle to promote Bel Canto, a book loosely based on the 1996 terrorist takeover of the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru. Reading at Oxford’s Square Books in June, Patchett captivated her audience as surely as Roxane Coss, the soprano protagonist, charmed the international guests gathered at the vice president’s mansion in an unnamed South American country before the whole company was taken hostage. Patchett has signed each of her four novels at the local store, beginning with The Patron Saint of Liars in 1992, and she was especially pleased to be in town shortly after the successful mayoral campaign of Square Books owner Richard Howorth.

A couple of weeks before her latest Oxford appearance, Patchett generously agreed to a long telephone interview, whose subjects ranged from Southern writing to her "musically deprived childhood." Born in Los Angeles, the novelist has lived in Nashville since she was six, and her first publisher marketed Patron Saint of Liars as a Southern novel, describing Patchett on the dustcover as Nashville born. The assumption was that readers would be more interested in a story about characters in a Kentucky home for unwed mothers if they thought she had always lived in the South—even though the novel’s main character is herself from California. Reinforcing the early identification of the writer with Southern settings, her second novel, Taft (1994), opens in a Beale Street bar named Muddy’s and includes a brief road trip to the Shiloh battlefield.

Patchett is "very, very happy to be thought of as a Southern author because Southern audiences have been very good to me." She estimates that readers from this region buy more of her books than people in other parts of the country. Moreover, Patchett’s favorite writers include many Southerners. "I’m a huge Faulkner fan—isn’t everybody?" she laughed. Light in August—"three times longer and three times easier than most of Faulkner"—is among her top Faulkner novels. Patchett has often cited Eudora Welty as an important influence on her work, and she also rates Carson McCullers highly: "She’s one of those authors you read when you’re young, and then when you’re an adult you think you need to read others, but she’s really good."

"For contemporary, I love Allan Gurganus," Patchett added. The North Carolina author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and White People was one of her creative writing teachers at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, "and the best I’ve ever had." Patchett went to Sarah Lawrence with plans to become a poet—"I’d spent my childhood reading poems"—but she claims she never wrote "a passingly decent poem," and she realized she wanted to write fiction as soon as she took Gurganus’s class. Among the "really good newer writers" she counts Tony Early, who lives in Nashville and has read from Jim the Boy at Square Books.

Morgan Freeman’s great interest in Patchett’s Taft could lead new audiences to consider her as part of the company of Southern writers. Patchett and Freeman met for the first time at a festive dinner on her visit to Oxford last summer, but she had been in regular communication with him since he bought the screen rights to the novel she calls "the book that bombed." Enthusiastically reviewed by the New York Times and other national media, Taft nevertheless has attracted a smaller readership than Patchett’s other three novels. When the students in my Southern women writers course read the book a few years ago, they enjoyed the Memphis locale but suggested that the relationship between Patchett’s African American narrator and the white teenager who works in his bar is implausible. 

Patchett has heard similar reactions from other readers. "Most of the reviews of my earlier books, whether they were positive reviews or negative reviews, said the plots were ‘implausible,’ even though they seemed very real to me. Anything can happen once; if you can imagine it, it can happen," she remarked. Morgan Freeman wants to play the role of bartender John Nickel, a somewhat unusual casting that necessitated differences in Patchett’s screenplay since the protagonist is 34 in her novel. Proud of her mother Jeanne Ray’s success as a first-time novelist at 60, Patchett told the Square Books audience that Ray’s bestseller Julie and Romeo has been optioned too, by Barbra Streisand. She warned Ray that film rights are no guarantee of an actual production, but Patchett clearly appreciates that "Having a film option helps keep me from having a job."

Patchett has occasionally taught creative writing at the University of the South and other schools for a semester at a time, leaving the rest of the year free for her own writing. "I wrote for magazines for years," she said, "and I have hundreds of my clippings in boxes at home, but now the novel business occupies my time." She still accepts such irresistible commissions as Gourmet magazine’s request for a piece on Italian opera that appeared in the June issue: "Their subtitle is The Magazine of Good Living, and they joke that I’m the ‘good living’ writer." The Gourmet essay was a natural for the author of Bel Canto, a novel that resonates with Patchett’s newfound love of opera. Reviewing the book for Oxford Town, University of Mississippi librarian Amy E. Mark proposed that "opera in Bel Canto serves to help the reader understand how genius and beauty can transform."

Before Patchett could portray this transformative magic, however, she had to overcome the lack of any real background in music. "Music was torture to me growing up," she said. "My stepfather was a doctor who was hooked on easy-listening stuff on the radio, and I didn’t buy a record until I was 15." Patchett knows that writing instructors often caution students not to write about anything they don’t know well, but she likes to "learn something new with every book, and for Bel Canto that was opera." Unfortunately, her preliminary efforts to appreciate the form were less than inspiring: "At first, I put Wagner on and hated it." But Fred Plotkin’s guidebook, Opera 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Opera, taught her how to listen. Patchett spent hours reading libretti, then rereading them along with the music. She stresses the need for total concentration: "It’s hard to do anything else while really listening to opera. You can’t fold laundry or dust!"

Consonant with the tragic melodrama of opera plots, the action of Bel Canto "pulls out all the stops," says Patchett. "In writing courses, you hear that melodrama is a big no-no, but I wondered what it would be like to follow that melodramatic inclination." In fact, melodramatic moments occur in all her books; and her third novel, The Magician’s Assistant (1997), with its startling revelations and visionary dreams, sets the stage for the high drama of Bel Canto. The vivid contrasts, in Magician’s Assistant, between warm Los Angeles— "where everyone is from somewhere else"—and chilly, homogeneous Nebraska anticipate the fatal clashes in the polyglot multiculture of Bel Canto. The amazing effect of Roxane Coss’s beautiful singing on hostages and terrorists alike seems even more surreal and dream-like in light of this fall’s all-too realterrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Yet, author Robb Forman Dew recently found "solace" in Patchett’s novel because "it delineates the way we manage to sustain hope."

The scope and setting of Bel Canto are reminiscent of the fiction of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, an author Patchett admires; but she sees her latest novel as "an homage to The Magic Mountain." Thomas Mann’s novel takes place in a tuberculosis sanitarium, "with love and intrigue among patients from all over the world who were forced to lie down for years at a time"—analogous to the weeks’ long isolation of Patchett’s characters. At the end of Magic Mountain, the convalescent Hans Castorp is abruptly sent off to war; and, says Patchett, "You’re pushed out into a world you weren’t prepared for by anything that happened earlier." Patchett’s well-crafted fiction has pushed her characters too into a series of new realms, from Saint Elizabeth’s Home in Habit, Kentucky, to Vice President Ruben Iglesias’s elegant South American mansion. For Ann Patchett, "The imagination is wonderful, and I like the idea of imagination travel." Her many readers eagerly await the next journey.

JOAN WYLIE HALL