People around me aren't breathless about Jennifer Haigh, and they should be. If only for "Baker Towers." I've read "Faith" and "Heat and Light," and those books didn't do a great deal for me, but "Baker Towers" is clearly a success.
A story involves a leap from an Ordinary World to some kind of Enchanted World. For the family at the center of "Baker Towers," the leap seems to involve a death. A Polish man in Western Pennsylvania dies young, and his wife is left to raise the kids. She is Italian--her English is shaky, and she isn't fully comfortable among Polish-American neighbors--and she maybe doesn't have time, or energy, to keep a close eye on each one of her children.
And so the imperfect children--imperfectly raised--try to cope with what life has given them. One stumbles into a bad marriage with a woman who drinks too much and who simply can't take an interest in Bakerton. This child--the oldest son, the one in the bad marriage--doesn't call home enough, and when he visits, he has to smile awkwardly through encounters with the woman he *ought to* have married, the one that got away.
Another child has brains and tenacity, but she seems to put herself in situations that weigh her down. She is left to care for her mother, who is overweight and going blind, and she also has to worry about her youngest sister, who eats too much and can't be bothered with honest self-reflection.
There's a daughter elsewhere--in D.C.--who seems to have a mini-stroke and simply stops speaking for weeks on end.
These are fairly quotidian problems; no one is saving the world or even struggling with being closeted or trying to hunt down a serial killer. But the vividness of the language--the impression that Haigh really, really knows her characters--keeps you turning the pages. It doesn't matter to me that I haven't encountered a gay male in Bakerton--as of yet. I see myself in the flawed and beleaguered people Haigh describes; these people struggle to know themselves and to articulate their wishes, and you sense that they're pushing up against an avalanche. They're in a precarious state. The details linger in my memory: the way the youngest daughter anticipates, eagerly, the last scoop of oatmeal, because that's the best, "slick with butter"; the excitement the mother feels on "Dago Day," a Church festival that upsets all the non-Italian businessmen; the irritating power struggle one daughter has with a small-minded landlady who can't just offer help where help is needed.
Before "Baker Towers," I was reading an overrated mystery by Louise Penny, who constantly seems to feel a need for sermonizing or explicitly reminding us how "high-stakes" her implausible scenario-of-the-moment really is. It's refreshing to go from that to Haigh's imagination, which is subtle and strange. Haigh writes with confidence. I feel like I've fallen into another world when I pick up this book. I look forward to "News from Heaven," despite the clunky title, because that collection of (Haigh) stories seems very well-regarded (just as "Baker Towers" is). In the meantime, I'm happy to have found the company of some loony and desperate people--the people of Bakerton--who can remind me just how difficult and wondrous life can be, even in an apparently pedestrian setting.
A story involves a leap from an Ordinary World to some kind of Enchanted World. For the family at the center of "Baker Towers," the leap seems to involve a death. A Polish man in Western Pennsylvania dies young, and his wife is left to raise the kids. She is Italian--her English is shaky, and she isn't fully comfortable among Polish-American neighbors--and she maybe doesn't have time, or energy, to keep a close eye on each one of her children.
And so the imperfect children--imperfectly raised--try to cope with what life has given them. One stumbles into a bad marriage with a woman who drinks too much and who simply can't take an interest in Bakerton. This child--the oldest son, the one in the bad marriage--doesn't call home enough, and when he visits, he has to smile awkwardly through encounters with the woman he *ought to* have married, the one that got away.
Another child has brains and tenacity, but she seems to put herself in situations that weigh her down. She is left to care for her mother, who is overweight and going blind, and she also has to worry about her youngest sister, who eats too much and can't be bothered with honest self-reflection.
There's a daughter elsewhere--in D.C.--who seems to have a mini-stroke and simply stops speaking for weeks on end.
These are fairly quotidian problems; no one is saving the world or even struggling with being closeted or trying to hunt down a serial killer. But the vividness of the language--the impression that Haigh really, really knows her characters--keeps you turning the pages. It doesn't matter to me that I haven't encountered a gay male in Bakerton--as of yet. I see myself in the flawed and beleaguered people Haigh describes; these people struggle to know themselves and to articulate their wishes, and you sense that they're pushing up against an avalanche. They're in a precarious state. The details linger in my memory: the way the youngest daughter anticipates, eagerly, the last scoop of oatmeal, because that's the best, "slick with butter"; the excitement the mother feels on "Dago Day," a Church festival that upsets all the non-Italian businessmen; the irritating power struggle one daughter has with a small-minded landlady who can't just offer help where help is needed.
Before "Baker Towers," I was reading an overrated mystery by Louise Penny, who constantly seems to feel a need for sermonizing or explicitly reminding us how "high-stakes" her implausible scenario-of-the-moment really is. It's refreshing to go from that to Haigh's imagination, which is subtle and strange. Haigh writes with confidence. I feel like I've fallen into another world when I pick up this book. I look forward to "News from Heaven," despite the clunky title, because that collection of (Haigh) stories seems very well-regarded (just as "Baker Towers" is). In the meantime, I'm happy to have found the company of some loony and desperate people--the people of Bakerton--who can remind me just how difficult and wondrous life can be, even in an apparently pedestrian setting.
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