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Jennifer Haigh's first novel, Mrs. Kimble, was an auspicious debut about three women who marry the same man--consecutively--and their ability to kid themselves about who he is, and, more to the point, who they are. It won the PEN/Hemingway Award, given annually for best first fiction. Haigh has beaten the sophomore slump with another page-turner: Baker Towers. The action, such as it is, takes place in post-World War II Bakerton, a Pennsylvania mining town. "...[T]he town's most famous landmark, known locally as the Towers, two looming piles of mine waste. They are forty feet high and growing... The mines were not named for Bakerton; Bakerton was named for the mines. This is an important distinction. It explains the order of things. Haigh lets us know this on page two, setting the backdrop for the family drama of the Novaks.
The story begins with the death of Stanley Novak, wife of Rose and father of Georgie, Dorothy, Joyce, Lucy, and Sandy. This is an Italian-Polish marriage, tolerated, but a break with the town's tradition. The personality, temperament and needs of all five Novaks are made clear to us by their choices--although they are not always clear to the Novaks. Their interaction, with each other and their community, is the stuff of the novel. Life revolves around the mines, the Church, gossip, and sports. Many times throughout the book it seems that Haigh is using a camera rather than a pen, so perfectly does she create a scene for the reader.
Georgie struggles to get away from Bakerton after his military service by going to Philadelphia and marrying the boss's daughter, a decision he lives to regret. Dorothy gets a job in D.C., but never really fits into the scene. A breakdown brings her home for good. Joyce joins the military, is appalled by the way she is treated, and hastens home to care for her ailing mother. Lucy, overweight and unwelcome with the "in" crowd, longs to be Fire Queen, the pinnacle of acceptance in Bakerton. Sandy, handsome and unreliable, leaves for big city life, finds it, and comes home periodically to hide out.
Haigh has captured these people's lives as they play out, more acted upon than acting. None of the Novaks is self-reflective; the girls accept the status quo, the boys escape and find that they have taken themselves with them. A foreshadowing of the changes that will take place is symbolized by a horrific mine explosion at the end of the book. This life that Haigh has so carefully described will soon disappear forever, for good or ill, but she has illuminated its current reality with a sure hand. --Valerie Ryan
From Publishers Weekly
The second novel by the author of the award-winning Mrs. Kimble depicts life in a postwar Pennsylvania mining town and continues Haigh's exploration of the hardships of women's lives. In the town of Bakerton, dominated by the towers of the title (made of slowly combusting piles of scrap coal), poor families live in ethnic enclaves of company houses. Italian Rose Novak broke with tradition by marrying a Polish man, but he dies in the book's first chapter, and Rose and her five children struggle through the years that follow. The oldest son, Georgie, returns from WWII and avoids the mining life by marrying the posh, cynical daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia store owner. Rose's daughter Dorothy gets a wartime job in glamorous Washington but breaks down and returns to Bakerton, while capable daughter Joyce, who joins the military just as the war ends, comes home to take care of her ailing mother, resenting Georgie and Sandy, the handsome youngest brother, who escape town. Only Rose and Lucy, the awkward youngest daughter, are content with things as they are. The story climaxes with a disaster at the mine, which affects each of the Novak children. Haigh's prose never soars, but she writes convincingly of family and smalltown relations, as well as of the intractable frustrations of American poverty. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
The towers of Jennifer Haigh's ambitious, elegiac second novel, Baker Towers, are Bakerton's "most famous landmark" -- two looming piles of mine waste . . . forty feet high and growing, graceful slopes of loose coal and sulfurous dirt." They are also evidence of the subterranean, dangerous mine work that is the life blood of this western Pennsylvania town. For Bakerton's residents, the towers offer a strange beauty that outsiders may not understand, and it's this -- the beauty within the harshness -- that the novel depicts. Haigh is interested in what's hidden from view, in questions of cultural and economic invisibility and, especially, in the unsung hopes and sacrifices of ordinary lives. Beginning in 1944 and spanning two-and-a-half decades, Baker Towers reveals the layers of Bakerton's Polish and Italian immigrant community life, and traces the loves and losses of the novel's central Polish-Italian Novak family.The first of these losses is the death of 54-year-old Stanley Novak, who collapses after returning from the night-time "Hoot Owl" shift at the Baker mines. His death and its aftermath quickly delineate the divisions between the Italian and Polish communities and underscore the day-to-day economic hardships for mining families. The Novak house and his widow, Rose Novak, anchor the novel, and the shifting narrative perspective -- which also includes views from secondary characters -- moves among the five Novak children as they come of age and travel beyond Bakerton. George serves in the Navy and attends college on the GI bill; Dorothy takes a job in Washington, D.C., soon after her father's death; Joyce, the family pragmatist, joins the military; Sandy, the younger, pleasure-seeking son, moves through a string of cities; and Lucy, an infant when her father dies, grows up in a much-altered family constellation. In exploring these lives, Haigh also explores -- and critiques -- the culture's sexual mores, the shaping influence of Catholicism and the fraught territory of female sexuality and independence. The equally fraught tensions between family responsibility and individual desire permanently mark these characters' lives, as do the sometimes brutal restrictions of class and gender. For Bakerton men, local roads lead to the mine; for the town's women, the dress factory. The Novak brothers find geographic and economic escape routes; the sisters in turn all leave Bakerton, but need, obligation and family ties pull them back.The lasting power of this novel is in Haigh's gift for capturing the long view and for putting Bakerton itself -- its history and community -- on the literary map. The novel is spliced through with brief chapters chronicling Bakerton's development and collective life, and Haigh's skill for summary and keen sense of detail make for evocative visual moments and overviews. Take, for example, Dorothy's view of the men at the annual Italian festival: "Old men, strongly perfumed, in pink shirts and pastel slacks. Some bald, with oiled scalps; others with low hairlines, graying pompadours beginning just above the eyebrows." Or a description of the dress factory transformed by late-day light: "The sun had set along the river; the windows of the dress factory glowed orange pink. Drums in the distance, the high school marching band practicing for the parade." The novel recreates an already vanishing world, and Haigh's restrained, graceful prose allows important absences and silences to resonate. Bakerton is difficult and richly communal, its family and neighborhood bonds powerful and sustaining, if also compromising.Baker Towers's narrative movement conveys an interest in memory and an expansive sense of time frequently revealed through the flash-forward -- an appealing strategy but one that often diminishes the power of the dramatic present, as does the tendency to leap forward in time and retrospectively summarize personal histories. These strategies can limit characterization and create distance from the Novaks, and readers may wish for more nuance and depth. Haigh's palpable evocation of 1940s and '50s Bakerton -- the community portrait -- is the novel's gift.This gift is a significant one. The ultimate inheritors of Bakerton's legacies and its hopes -- Lucy Novak, her childhood friend Leonard, George's son Arthur -- are headed for neither the mines nor the dress factory, their economic and geographic options far greater than Rose's and Stanley's. "The town wore away like a bar of soap," Haigh writes, but she has brought this ephemeral world to light. Baker Towers is, finally, a rich portrait of place, its meaning not in the towers themselves but in the community that created them, and Haigh's readers will empathize with Lucy Novak's wish to remain. Reviewed by Nancy Reisman Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Haigh, author of the award-winning Mrs. Kimble (*** May/June 2003) and the granddaughter of coal miners, grew up in a Pennsylvania mining town. She introduces an unsentimental, harsh beauty into her fictional rendering of one family’s lives in a town that "wore away like a bar of soap" as mining left an economically bereft, scarred landscape. The heart of the novel centers on Haigh’s characters as they make certain life choices within the era’s social mores. Shifting narrative perspectives pierced by short chapters about Bakerton add depth to the story. Most critics praised Haigh’s spare writing style; only The Oregonian thought it stripped the novel of energy. Overall, Baker Towers is a hymn to a vintage way of life from a promising new voice. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Haigh's second novel, following the glowing Mrs. Kimble (2003), is set in Bakerton, a mining town in post-World World II Pennsylvania. Haigh's focus is the Novak family, particularly the five children being raised by their Italian mother after their Polish father drops dead. All five make attempts to escape Bakerton at one point or another; some are successful, others are not. George, a veteran of WW II, neglects his Bakerton fiancee and marries a cold socialite. Dorothy goes to the nation's capital to work, but a nervous breakdown brings her home. Brilliant, cold Joyce thinks her future lies with the military, but she is sorely disappointed. Sandy is the golden son who escapes to dubious success. And Lucy is the youngest, who finds herself in college despite the nagging feeling that she never wanted to leave home in the first place. Haigh creates a real sense of a community and brings her mining town to life through a large cast of minor characters who pass in and out of the Novaks' lives. The mines that the town is built upon cannot be forgotten either, even as their time comes, disastrously, to pass. Baker Towers^B is a novel possessing a rare, quiet power to evoke a time long past and the character of the people who lived then. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Harlan Coben, The Birmingham News
"Terrific."
Booklist (starred review)
"A novel possessing a rare, quiet power."
Publishers Weekly
"Jennifer Haigh stakes a claim for a major breakout."
Publishers Weekly
"[Haigh] writes convincly of family and smalltown relations, as well as of the intractable frustrations of American poverty."
Publishers Weekly
"[Haigh] writes convincingly of family and small town relations, as well as of the intractable frustrations of American poverty."
Entertainment Weekly
"In clean, authoritative prose, Haigh uncannily injects new life into an era too often entombed by nostalgia."
New York Times
"The living, breathing organism that is Haigh’s captivating book… [is an] effortlessly haunting story… [Haigh is] an expert natural storyteller."
People Magazine, Critic's Choice, Four Stars
"In prose rich in sensual detail… Haigh proves herself a fine storyteller… She has created a heartfelt and heartrending tale."
Daily News
"A good old-fashioned read... the author deftly evokes the particulars of a time and place."
Washington Post Book World
"Jennifer Haigh’s ambitious, elegiac second novel, Baker Towers [is]… a rich portrait of place."
Book Description
A stunning follow-up to her bestselling debut,
Mrs. Kimble, Jennifer Haigh returns with
Baker Towers, a compelling story of love and loss
in a western Pennsylvania mining town in
the years after World War II
Bakerton is a company town built on coal, a town of church festivals and ethnic neighborhoods, hunters' breakfasts and firemen's parades. Its children are raised in company houses -- three rooms upstairs, three rooms downstairs. Its ball club leads the coal company league. The twelve Baker mines offer good union jobs, and the looming black piles of mine dirt don't bother anyone. Called Baker Towers, they are local landmarks, clear evidence that the mines are booming. Baker Towers mean good wages and meat on the table, two weeks' paid vacation and presents under the Christmas tree.
The mines were not named for Bakerton; Bakerton was named for the mines. This is an important distinction. It explains the order of things.
Born and raised on Bakerton's Polish Hill, the five Novak children come of age during wartime, a thrilling era when the world seems on the verge of changing forever. The oldest, Georgie, serves on a minesweeper in the South Pacific and glimpses life beyond Bakerton, a promising future he is determined to secure at all costs. His sister Dorothy, a fragile beauty, takes a job in Washington, D.C., and finds she is unprepared for city life. Brilliant Joyce longs to devote herself to something of consequence but instead becomes the family's keystone, bitterly aware of the opportunities she might have had elsewhere. Sandy sails through life on looks and charm, and Lucy, the volatile baby, devours the family's attention and develops a bottomless appetite for love.
Baker Towers is a family saga and a love story, a hymn to a time and place long gone, to America's industrial past and the men and women we now call the Greatest Generation. This is a feat of imagination from an extraordinary new voice in American fiction, a writer of enormous power and skill.
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