Baker Towers
Jennifer Haigh, 2005
HarperCollins
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060509422
Summary
After her 2003 award winning novel, Mrs. Kimble, Jennifer Haigh returns with Baker Towers, a family saga set in coal mining Bakerton, PA during the industrial boom following WWII.
Baker Towers is an intimate exploration of love and family set in a western Pennsylvania coal town in the years following World War II. Bakerton is a town of company houses and church festivals, union squabbles and firemen's parades. Its ball club leads the coal company leagues. Its neighborhoods are Little Italy, Swedetown and Polish Hill.
For the five Novak children, the forties are a decade of tragedy, excitement and stunning change. George comes home from the war determined to leave Bakerton behind and finds the task impossible. Dorothy is a fragile beauty hooked on romance. Brilliant Joyce holds the family together, bitterly aware of the life she might have had elsewhere, while her brother Sandy sails through life on looks and charm. At the center of it all is Lucy, the volatile baby, devouring the family's attention and developing a bottomless appetite for love.
Baker Towers is both a family saga and a love letter to our industrial past, to the men and women known as the Greatest Generation; to the vibrant small-town life of America's Rust Belt when it was still shiny and new. (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
Like Richard Russo's Empire Falls, Bakerton is a place in transition. "The town wore away like a bar of soap," Ms. Haigh writes. "Each year, smaller and less distinct, the letters of its name fading. The thing it had been became harder to discern." But this book has the heart to end, credibly and unsentimentally, on a note of rebirth. And Bakerton is utterly, entrancingly alive on the page even as it is supposed to be fading away.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
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.
Nancy Reisman - Washington Post
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.
Publishers Weekly
Baker towers, the piles of slag dumped near the railroad siding for the Baker Coal Mines, are the reason that pre-World War II Bakerton, PA, exists; the company is the town, and the town is the company. The Novak family lives in a company house in the town's Polish section, shops at the company store, goes to the company hospital, and lives by the company time clock. When Stanley Novak drops dead from a massive heart attack, he leaves behind a wife and five children who must struggle to survive. During the war, employment is not too difficult to find-even for the girls-but finding a place in the world is a little more challenging. The children leave home and return. The miners go on strike. The eldest daughter marries the high school principal. The second-oldest daughter shocks her family by consorting with a divorced Italian. A catastrophic explosion eventually closes down the mines. The town, however, remains, and life continues as the world moves on. In her second novel (after Mrs. Kimble), PEN/Hemingway Award winner Haigh uses evocative prose to create a picture of a company town-and of the human condition-that is both accurate and moving. Recommended.—Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Providence.
Library Journal
An elegant, elegiac multigenerational saga about a small coal-mining community in western Pennsylvania that shows how talented she really is. Fast on the heels of her PEN/Hemingway-winning if stagy first novel (Mrs. Kimble, 2003), Haigh turns a careful, loving eye on the sociology of the town of Bakerton, resting her focus most intently on the Poles and Italians who work together but live in their own neighborhoods. At the heart of the story are the five children of Stanley Novak, a Polish miner, and his Italian wife Rose. When Stanley dies of a heart attack in 1944, oldest son George is away in the Pacific. Eighteen-year-old Dorothy, diffident and plain, takes a secretarial position in Washington, DC, after losing her factory job. High-schooler Joyce shows unusual academic gifts. Eight-year-old Sandy is a charmer. And Lucy is a baby. Over the years, the siblings, along with a host of friends and neighbors, grow and evolve, sometimes as expected, sometimes not. George, eager to escape the mines, marries into a wealthy Philadelphia family (the one jarring note here being his spoiled wife's lack of redeeming characteristics) and erases his connection with home. Dorothy, broken by her experience in the outside world, returns to Bakerton, where she's redeemed by a love affair with a divorced man. Joyce attempts to escape into the Air Force but comes back home out of a sense of duty to her ailing mother, then slowly builds a rewarding life for herself. Sandy becomes a drifter. Well-educated, thanks to Joyce, Lucy chooses life in Bakerton. Their lives unfold in episodes that tie the individual to the community, and the lines of connection between characters—even the most minor—weave an intricate social tapestry. By the time the mines close for good, every thread connects. Almost mythic in its ambition, somewhere between Oates and Updike country, and thoroughly satisfying.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Do the opening paragraphs depict Bakerton as an oppressive community or a utopia, or a combination of the two? Viewing the town itself as a character, how would you describe its biography?
2. Discuss the social distinctions embodied in the Novak family. What roles did society prescribe for Rose and Stanley, based on gender and class? Did their children lead more fulfilling lives than their parents?
3. Do you attribute the differences between the siblings to temperament or circumstance? How was each one affected by Stanley's death?
4. How would you characterize the author's narrative style? What is the effect of her choices regarding scenery, storyline, and other aspects of the novel's architecture?
5. Before meeting Rose, Antonio Bernardi had never seen an Italian wife on Polish Hill. In what ways has the American immigrant experience, and the character of immigrant communities, changed over the past century?
6. George's parents named him after George Washington rather than calling him Stanley Novak, Jr. They wanted to emphasize the American, not Polish, aspect of his identity. What freedoms and restrictions are illustrated by George's marriage, and his wistful love of Ev? What enables his son to embrace Bakerton?
7. What keeps Dorothy in Washington, D.C., in a life defined by repetitiveness and sterility for so many years? How does her definition of morality shift throughout the novel? What does her perception of the world reveal about her perception of herself?
8. Joyce's intellectual drive is accompanied by a strong dose of practicality. Do you view her as the family's savior or as a wet blanket? Why do so many of her efforts go unappreciated?
9. Is Sandy the antithesis of George, or a reflection of him? Does either brother remind you of Stanley?
10. What does Lucy convey about the nature of hunger, and the nature of beauty? What is the significance of her eventual role as healer?
11. The tragic mine disaster shapes the novel's conclusion, leading to the image of Amish settlers arriving in Saxon County. What dies along with Eugene Stusick and his co-workers? What allows something new to be reborn in this community?
12. Who are the novel's most prosperous characters? How do you define prosperity in your own life? What family legacies have shaped your dreams?
13. Mrs. Kimble also conveyed a theme of illusion versus reality. Compare the ways in which that theme plays out in both novels.
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page (summary)