News from Heaven: The Bakerton Stories
Jennifer Haigh, 2013
HarperCollins
244 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060889647
Summary
A collection of unforgettable short stories inspired by a Pennsylvania coal-mining town and the people who call it home.
When her iconic novel Baker Towers was published in 2005, it was hailed as a modern classic—"compassionate and powerful...a song of praise for a too-little-praised part of America, for the working families whose toils and constancy have done so much to make the country great" (Chicago Tribune). Its young author, Jennifer Haigh, was called "an expert natural storyteller with an acute sense of her characters' humanity" (New York Times).
Now, in this collection of interconnected short stories, Jennifer Haigh returns to the vividly imagined world of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, a coal-mining town rocked by decades of painful transition. From its heyday during two world wars through its slow decline, Bakerton is a town that refuses to give up gracefully, binding—sometimes cruelly—succeeding generations to the place that made them.
A young woman glimpses a world both strange and familiar when she becomes a live-in maid for a Jewish family in New York City. A long-absent brother makes a sudden and tragic homecoming. A solitary middle-aged woman tastes unexpected love when a young man returns to town. With a revolving cast of characters—many familiar to fans of Baker Towers—these stories explore how our roots, the families and places in which we are raised, shape the people we eventually become.
News from Heaven looks unflinchingly at the conflicting human desires for escape and for connection, and explores the enduring hold of home. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 16, 1968
• Where—Barnesboro, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., Dickenson College; M.F.A., Iowa Writers'
Workshop
• Awards—2002 James A. Michener Fellowship; 2003;
PEN/Hemingway Award for Outstanding First Fiction, Mrs.
Kimble; 2006 PEN/L.L. Winship Award for outstanding book
by a New England author, Baker Towers
• Currently—lives in Boston, Massachusetts
The daughter of a librarian and a high school English teacher, Jennifer Haigh was raised with her older brother in the coal-mining town of Barnesboro, Pennsylvania. Although she began writing as a student at Dickinson College, her undergraduate degree was in French. After college, she moved to France on a Fulbright Scholarship, returning to the U.S. in 1991.
Haigh spent most of the decade working in publishing, first for Rodale Press in Pennsylvania, then for Self magazine in New York City. It was not until her 30th birthday that she was bitten by the writing bug. She moved to Baltimore (where it was cheaper to live), supported herself as a yoga instructor, and began to publish short stories in various literary magazines. She was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop and enrolled in their two-year M.F.A. program. While she was at Iowa, she completed the manuscript for her first novel, Mrs. Kimble. She also caught the attention of a literary agent scouting the grad school for new talent and was signed to a two-book contract. Haigh was astonished at how quickly everything came together.
Mrs. Kimble became a surprise bestseller when it was published in 2003. Readers and critics alike were bowled over by this accomplished portrait of a "serial marrier" and the three wives whose lives he ruins. The Washington Post raved, "It's a clever premise, backed up by three remarkably well-limned Mrs. Kimbles, each of whom comes tantalizingly alive thanks to the author's considerable gift for conjuring up a character with the tiniest of details." The novel went on to win the PEN/Hemingway Award for Outstanding First Fiction.
Skeptics who wondered if Haigh's success had been mere beginner's luck were set straight when Baker Towers appeared in 2005. A multigenerational saga set in a Pennsylvania coal-mining community in the years following WWII, the novel netted Haigh the PEN/L.L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author. (Haigh lives in Massachusetts.) The New York Times called it "captivating," and Kirkus Reviews described it as "[a]lmost mythic in its ambition, somewhere between Oates and Updike country, and thoroughly satisfying." High praise indeed for a sophomore effort.
In fact, Haigh continues to produce dazzling literary fiction in both its short and long forms, much of it centered on the interwoven lives of families. When asked why she returns so often to this theme, she answers, " In fact, every story is a family story: we all come from somewhere, and it's impossible to write well-developed characters without giving a great deal of thought to their childhood environments, their early experiences, and whose genetic material they're carrying around."
Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:
• All my life I've fantasized about being invisible. I love the idea of watching people when they don't know they're being observed. Novelists get to do that all the time!
• When I was a child, I told my mother I wanted to grow up to be a genie, a gas station attendant, or a writer. I hope I made the right choice.
• When asked what book most influenced her life as a writer, here is her response:
Light Years by James Salter. Probably the most honest book ever written about men and women—sad, gorgeous, unflinching.
• Favorite authors: James Salter and Vladimir Nabokov. For a writer, reading them is like taking vitamins. (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
…Ms. Haigh is one of the most subtle, incisive fiction writers currently exploring the dynamics of big, secretive families, the kinds whose members are much more apt to betray private thoughts than speak them out loud. Throughout News From Heaven, her combined gifts for piercing acuity and discreet understatement make a powerful mix…Although News from Heaven may sound full of sad situations, it's an uplifting and radiant book.... It is Ms. Haigh's great gift to make all of these people come alive and to make readers really care how their destinies unfold.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
A vibrant, thought-provoking, profoundly readable contribution to the genre.... Each of these ten linked stories represents a distinct, shining example of Haigh’s remarkable gifts for lyricism, psychological insight, and stealth humor.
Boston Globe
After her success with Baker Towers (2005), Haigh returns to the familiarity of Bakerton, Pennsylvania—the small coal mining "town of churches and bars" where "everybody knows your business"—for this short story collection that weaves through the generations of hopes, dreams, and regrets of a community.... The melancholia of these interconnected stories exude guilt, disappointment, and terminated dreams alongside a quiet strength in the memories of each former or current resident. Haigh skillfully explores a community and their conflicting sentiments of family and responsibility against desires for a future beyond the narrow scope of their hometown.
Publishers Weekly
These connected short stories, set in the coal-mining town of Bakerton, PA, span the 1940s to the present. Beautifully written and deeply moving, they feature characters whose lives have not turned out the way they had imagined.... Some episodes end painfully, but occasionally the protagonists rise up and find hope and strength amid the disappointments. All of their struggles linger in the mind. This is a masterly collection. —Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Despite its treacly title, this collection of short stories shows depth, understanding and compassion rather than sentimentality. Most of the stories take place in or near Bakerton, Pa., populated largely by Polish and Italian Catholic immigrants.... Haigh's narratives are beautifully realized stories of heartbreak, of qualified love and of economic as well as personal depression.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What is the significance of the title, News from Heaven?
2. Describe the Bakerton, Pennsylvania, that is captured in the pages of News from Heaven. What do these stories tell you about this place and the people who were born and raised there?
3. Do you think Bakerton is a typical American small town? How does it reflect American values and the nation's development over the course of the twentieth century, when these stories are set?
4. In Bakerton's heyday, the town proudly erected a sign that described its value: "Bakerton Coal Lights the World." Yet a half century later, the sign has been vandalized to read "Bakerton Coal Blights the World." How does time change the town and the people who live there? Do you think places like Bakerton will rise again?
5. What are the overarching themes that connect the stories and these characters? Choose a particular theme and trace it in an individual character's experience and throughout each of the storis in the book.
6. Some of the characters are desperate to escape Bakerton while others are content to remain. What drives their choices? What makes these people so different from each other? What do we gain—and what do we lose—by either choice? What are the benefits and the drawbacks of living in a place like Bakerton?
7. What means of escape are available to those characters who do leave town? What about those who may have contemplated leaving but have not? Is life harder on those who go—or the loved ones they leave behind? Think about Sandy Novak and his sister Joyce Novak Hauser, or Regina Yahner in the story "Broken Star." What are the consequences of their choices?
8. How did growing up in Bakerton shape various characters? Talk about one or two and use passages from the book to illustrate your argument. How is Bakerton reflected in the lives of those who choose to go? What does it offer those who remain?
9. What is life like in Bakerton for outsiders like Alan Spangler in "Something Sweet"? What connects him to his teacher, Miss Peale? Contrast Alan's experiences with those of Mitch Spanek in "Favorite Son." What does it take to fit in a place like Bakerton?
10. In "A Place in the Sun," Sandy Novak left Bakerton and it's "bleak small-town life worse than jail," for the promise of something better out west. Is the grass truly greener elsewhere? Why? Years later, the woman he loves, Vera Gold, tells his sister Joyce, "Whenever he got into trouble, he figured he'd always have this place to come back to." Could Sandy have ever gone back? Is it possible to "go home" again? What happens to those who do, like Ray in "The Bottom of Things"?
11. Ray had always believed that "there were two kinds of men: men who took advantage of their freedom and men who threw it away; men who lived big lives and men who were content being small." Can you live a big life in a small town? If you choose to stay in Bakerton, is that the same as being "content being small"? What does Ray learn about himself when he visits Bakerton for his parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary? Do you think he can find deliverance embracing the responsibilities he once longed to escape?
12. Talk about your own hometown. If you have revisited, do you hold the same opinions you did when you lived there? How can time and distance alter our outlook? What, ultimately, changes?
13. Did you have a favorite story or character in News of Heaven? Elaborate on your choices.
14. What do the experiences of the characters in News from Heaven teach us about ourselves, our home towns, and life itself?
15. The stories in News from Heaven are set in the same location as Jennifer Haigh's earlier book Baker Towers, and several characters from that novel—Sandy, Dorothy and George Novak, Viola Peale, Joyce and Ed Hauser—make appearances in News from Heaven. If you have read Baker Towers, how do the two books compare? What are some reasons a writer might return to the setting of an earlier book?
(Questions issued by publisher.)