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Haigh has one of her characters say, as she pivots handily from the townspeople’s perspective to the workers’. “The irony is, Bakerton used to be an immigrant town,” Ms. They watch the newcomers helplessly, gossiping that perhaps these are “illegal Mexicans” or Army deserters or terrorists from Gitmo.

He gets to keep track of both the town vamp and the new influx of Texas roughnecks, hired to do the fracking.īakerton’s unemployed locals stay that way because they don’t know how to do this work. 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.īy night, Rich helps his father in the town’s main bar, which might as well be the Town Hall. By day, Rich is a prison guard, which allows Ms. For one thing, he has more work to handle than anyone else in this story. To the extent that “Heat and Light” has a main character, he is Rich Devlin. There’s suspense in the way they eventually connect, but it’s hard to summarize. “Heat and Light” - not a helpful title - is really a deftly interwoven set of stories. And the trouble begins cheerfully, with hucksters paying house calls on the local landowners, beginning each conversation with: “Beautiful property you’ve got here.” “Heat and Light,” her latest and most sweepingly panoramic book, opens up a whole new chapter in this town’s fraught history. People with Bakerton roots, she writes, have “the foregone conclusion that every worthwhile thing has already happened. 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. The mines kept Bakerton’s men employed until disaster struck, turning one site into a graveyard. Haigh put Bakerton on the map with “Baker Towers.” The title refers to two huge heaps of sulfurous waste from Bakerton’s coal mines, which bleakly signaled prosperity. With this book, she moves one big step closer to being in their league.

They are part of the stellar literary lineup of her admirers. Her work is gripping, real and totally immersive, akin to that of writers as different as Richard Price, Richard Ford and Richard Russo. Haigh is an expertly nuanced storyteller long overdue for major attention. 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.

“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 Ms.