A small town saga

Heat and Light
Jennifer Haigh
Ecco Press
2016, pp 430, Rs 1,847

Rural Pennsylvania doesn’t fascinate the world, not generally,” Jennifer Haigh writes in Heat and Light. “But cyclically, periodically, its innards are of interest.” They become of immense interest when Haigh writes about them, as she has in several novels set in the fictitious coal town of Bakerton, in the western part of the state.

Haigh is an expertly nuanced storyteller long overdue for major attention. Her work is gripping, real and totally immersive, akin to that of writers as different as Richard Price, Richard Ford and Richard Russo. They are part of the stellar literary line-up of her admirers. With this book, she moves one big step closer to being in their league.

Haigh put Bakerton on the map with Baker Towers. The title refers to two huge heaps of sulphurous waste from Bakerton’s coal mines, which bleakly signaled prosperity. The mines kept Bakerton’s men employed until disaster struck, turning one site into a graveyard. Haigh has also told the story of Bakerton’s founding — the town is named for the mines, not the other way around — and written about what happens to natives when they try to transplant themselves to other places.

People with Bakerton roots, she writes, have “the foregone conclusion that every worthwhile thing has already happened. The town is all aftermath.” Not quite. Heat and Light, her latest and most sweepingly panoramic book, opens up a whole new chapter in this town’s fraught history. And the trouble begins cheerfully, with hucksters paying house calls on the local landowners, beginning each conversation with: “Beautiful property you’ve got here.”

What a good deal they seem to be offering. Just sell the underground drilling rights, and your beautiful property will stay that way; it’s just that there may be a little extraction of natural gas going on a mile underground. This premise is all Haigh needs to populate her book with a large, broad, completely believable cast of characters who lock antlers over Bakerton’s latest development and whose viewpoints are all over the map.

Heat and Light — not a helpful title — is really a deftly interwoven set of stories. There’s suspense in the way they eventually connect, but it’s hard to summarise. To the extent that Heat and Light has a main character, he is Rich Devlin. For one thing, he has more work to handle than anyone else in this story. By day, Rich is a prison guard, which allows Haigh to evoke a keen sense of what goes wrong in Bakerton — it’s a big town for methamphetamine — and set the stage for something that hits the Devlin family later.

By night, Rich helps his father in the town’s main bar, which might as well be the Town Hall. He gets to keep track of both the town vamp and the new influx of Texas roughnecks, hired to do the fracking.

Bakerton’s unemployed locals stay that way because they don’t know how to do this work. They watch the newcomers helplessly, gossiping that perhaps these are “illegal Mexicans” or Army deserters or terrorists from Gitmo. “The irony is, Bakerton used to be an immigrant town,” Haigh has one of her characters say, as she pivots handily from the townspeople’s perspective to the workers’. About a rig manager who plays a key role in the story, she writes: “He’s worked in Pennsylvania 10 months, long enough for him to have a small affection for the place, not long enough for it to have taken the slightest notice of him.”

Once Haigh has introduced her slew of seemingly unrelated characters, she begins drawing them together. No wild coincidences here: One of her great skills is making the interactions in her books feel utterly true, as well as inevitable, since she has set these people on collision courses. Rich has been quick to sell his land rights to a fracking company, and his bizarrely childlike wife, Shelby, will be the first Bakertonian to complain that the water smells funny. The nurse who lives nearby, Rena, will chuckle with the other emergency room nurses, who nickname Shelby Chicken Little. But we eventually find out how Shelby became so peculiar. And she has a jolting secret that emerges late in the book. Meanwhile, Rena’s entirely separate story is one of the best things Heat and Light has to offer.

Heat and Light also involves 2 pastors, but that’s as close as it comes to being preachy. If it has a mission, to use another Lorne Trexley word, it is to humanise all aspects of another of Bakerton’s terrible conundrums and to draw readers once more into the heart of this living, breathing town. Haigh, who comes from a Pennsylvania coal town herself, has also done her best job yet of adding breadth to a Bakerton story. Heat and Light reaches all the way to the afterlife and even extends to include EST, or Erhard Seminars Training, a fashionably abusive form of enlightenment that could be had at the time the novel’s Texas energy company was born.

Werner Erhard, EST’s creator, turns up to lead a session in which he harangues attendees with the news that everything bad that’s ever happened to them is their own fault. But what about the people exposed to radiation after Three Mile Island, Kip, aka the Whip, the novel’s future fracking tycoon and Bakerton-despoiler, asks prophetically. Did they do that to themselves? Are they to blame? Really?