John Lennon once said that, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans." John Gardner's early novel, Nickel Mountain, is an exploration of this theme through the life of a fat, middle aged, diner owner in the Catskills mountain region of New York. Set in the 1950's Gardner weaves a pastoral novel from a set of interconnected stories centered around Henry Soames.

Henry is a soft, sentimental character, a fixture of his community and friend to all the lonely and damaged people of his environs. When the novel opens, Henry is an outsider, operating a road side diner and gas station catering to truckers and drunks...people passing through life, adrift and alone. His clientele is a mirror image of his own life. He lives in the dilapidated lean-to room behind the diner at the edge of town. Restless and facing his own mortality, he finds a new life by accident when he hires Callie Wells, the teenage daughter of the girl he loved in high school. Callie's dream is to earn enough money to leave home and move to New York City.

When Callie becomes pregnant and is abandoned by the son a local dairy farmer, Henry offers to marry her and give her child a father. (This is a small town in the 1950's after all!) And so the central theme of the book is set into play, the manner in which chance and accident determine the course of a person's life. What is, at first, a marriage of convenience, deepens over time into a stable, rich life. It isn't the life that either imagined or deliberately sought, but it is, nevertheless, the life which they chose to build for themselves from the wreakage of their dreams.

Slowly, Henry is changed by the chance pregnancy and marriage. Callie and their son James gives his life a new meaning and direction. Where, at the beginning, Henry is operating the Stop-Off diner on the periphery of society, his new family serves to integrate him into the larger community and give him roots. By the end of the novel, the Stop-Off diner has been replaced by The Maples restaurant mirroring Henry's own transformation from a lonely outsider into a member of a larger family.

The theme of transformative chance is continued through the lives of Henry and Callie's friends and neighbors. Each life is changed and defined by some accident--a limb lost in a farming accident, a burned home, a secret hit-and-run, the death of a child. Everyone is visited and altered by fortune.

The novel obviously began life as a series of stories (the introduction suggests that they were writing workshop exercises) with a common theme and characters. After achieving success with The Sunlight Dialogs and Grendel, Gardner pulled Nickel Mountain out of the bottom drawer, polished it up and published it. The book bears the scars of its birth as it is episodic and written in slightly varying styles suggesting its early and fitful genesis. The early sections feel heavily influenced by Faulkner, but later sections show the slow emergence of Gardner's own individual style. ( )

Not the author of the new James Bond novels, this James Gardner tells the story of Henry Soames, a fat, gentle, middle-aged man and the young, plain girl who drifts into his life and becomes a part of it. The book chronicles Henry's efforts to make sense out of this life he is stumbling through, and at the end he appears to have succeeded in a way, even if he can't exactly articulate it (nor can this reader). At times a plodding, aimless-seeming novel, but well worth the time and thought. ( )