Baker Towers (Haigh) - Book Reviews

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