Book excerpt: At the heart of John Gardner's Nickel Mountain is an uncommon love story set in a small Catskill community in the 1950s: when, at forty-two, the obese, gentle, and anxious Henry Soames marries seventeen-year-old Callie Wells -- who is pregnant with the child of a local boy -- it is much more than age that defines the gulf between them. The plot turns on tragic events -- they might be accidents or they might be acts of will -- involving a cast of rural eccentrics that includes a lonely amputee veteran, a religious hysteric (thought by some to be the devil himself), and an itinerant "Goat Lady." Questions of guilt and innocence, and even murder, are ulitmately eclipsed by Henry Soame's quiet discovery of grace. Novelist William H. Gass, a friend and colleague fo the author, has wirtten an introduction that shines new light on the work and career of the much praised and often misunderstood John Gardner.