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A review by kathleenww
News from Heaven: The Bakerton Stories by Jennifer Haigh
5.0
Jennifer Haigh is a wonderful writer, with a lovely way with a turn of phrase. I've read two of her novels, and was very excited about her short fiction collection, and it does not disappoint. These vignettes of people's lives in a small Pennsylvania town, Bakerton, from shortly before World War One to the present are poignant, sad and hopeful.
Haigh gives us 10 beautifully wrought short stories, each with a meaningful name and its own character. We are introduced to the inhabitants of Bakerton initially in Beast and Bird, through two Polish teenage girls from Bakerton sent to work for Jewish families in New York City. It is in this story that we learn the flavor of provincial life in Bakerton: mind your own business, make smart choices (not emotional ones), do your duty and accept your fate.
This thread continues, back in Bakerton, when we are introduced to a spinster teacher, a relative of the Baker's for whom the town is named, who lives with her simple minded sister, but is flattered by a student who reminds her of her "first love." Here we find out that appearances in Bakerton are not, and never have been what they seem.
Broken Star, one of two first person narratives, reveals several family secrets, like layers of an onion, peeled back and causing tears. The stories move slowly forwards through time, and we begin to recognize names we've heard before, as in this story, we recognize family connections. Thrift also introduces characters with deep ties to place, two sisters, a caretaker and a spoiled baby sister.
A few people think they escape Bakerton, but they return, or are haunted by the place and its pull in their life. Haigh uses astronomical objects as metaphor in the names of many of her stories, and we can feel the gravitational pull of sun and star, just as the people of Bakerton feel the pull of place, like it or not. Escape is rarely fully possible. Many often return and are unable to cut the ties that bind, and often cut.
This is not full of stories with happy endings, but full of genuine life endings: people die, secrets are usually revealed to family at those times, and people choose to embrace those secrets as part of their loved ones, or continue to deny them. One of the most striking stories, Favorite Son (the other first person narrative) is about a man who returns, defeated, unemployed, and lost. The problem is no one understands how long he's been keeping the secret, or how painful it is, until it is too late. Someone almost always knows. The town is slowly dying from the start of the book, through the loss of its young men to war, to the mines, to unemployment. In the second to last story, we never really meet Sunny Baker, a descendant of the founders of Bakerton, but she is discussed and trashed ad nauseum: her home is an eye sore, she has been the town eccentric as of late, and with the building of a new prison, something must be done. However, the prison has been there all along.
Haigh has done an amazing job with these stories, reminiscent of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge in their depth and warmth, and in their examination of small town life. I highly recommend this book to any fiction lover, it is a form that is wildly under appreciated, especially with artists as talented as Jennifer Haigh.
Haigh gives us 10 beautifully wrought short stories, each with a meaningful name and its own character. We are introduced to the inhabitants of Bakerton initially in Beast and Bird, through two Polish teenage girls from Bakerton sent to work for Jewish families in New York City. It is in this story that we learn the flavor of provincial life in Bakerton: mind your own business, make smart choices (not emotional ones), do your duty and accept your fate.
This thread continues, back in Bakerton, when we are introduced to a spinster teacher, a relative of the Baker's for whom the town is named, who lives with her simple minded sister, but is flattered by a student who reminds her of her "first love." Here we find out that appearances in Bakerton are not, and never have been what they seem.
Broken Star, one of two first person narratives, reveals several family secrets, like layers of an onion, peeled back and causing tears. The stories move slowly forwards through time, and we begin to recognize names we've heard before, as in this story, we recognize family connections. Thrift also introduces characters with deep ties to place, two sisters, a caretaker and a spoiled baby sister.
A few people think they escape Bakerton, but they return, or are haunted by the place and its pull in their life. Haigh uses astronomical objects as metaphor in the names of many of her stories, and we can feel the gravitational pull of sun and star, just as the people of Bakerton feel the pull of place, like it or not. Escape is rarely fully possible. Many often return and are unable to cut the ties that bind, and often cut.
This is not full of stories with happy endings, but full of genuine life endings: people die, secrets are usually revealed to family at those times, and people choose to embrace those secrets as part of their loved ones, or continue to deny them. One of the most striking stories, Favorite Son (the other first person narrative) is about a man who returns, defeated, unemployed, and lost. The problem is no one understands how long he's been keeping the secret, or how painful it is, until it is too late. Someone almost always knows. The town is slowly dying from the start of the book, through the loss of its young men to war, to the mines, to unemployment. In the second to last story, we never really meet Sunny Baker, a descendant of the founders of Bakerton, but she is discussed and trashed ad nauseum: her home is an eye sore, she has been the town eccentric as of late, and with the building of a new prison, something must be done. However, the prison has been there all along.
Haigh has done an amazing job with these stories, reminiscent of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge in their depth and warmth, and in their examination of small town life. I highly recommend this book to any fiction lover, it is a form that is wildly under appreciated, especially with artists as talented as Jennifer Haigh.