Life may punish these characters, but the writing itself always accords them due respect. A prosperous executive regrets once failing his luckless brother the daughter of a mine-owning family lives for decades in a hovel surrounded by junk a just-turned-50 virgin finds love with a young ex-con in a trailer a bereaved widow discovers her husband’s infidelity but remains loyal to his memory. Haigh has a fine eye for how time works on characters’ theories about themselves. This is a town that keeps asking: Where can you go, really, if you think you can get out of here? for sale signs appeared on lawns, in windows, but no one was buying.”Įven in better days, the local habit has been to assume limits, dare low. At Baker Six the men worked three days a week. Baker Nine had closed, and the Fourteen would soon follow. Driving down Main Street was like visiting a beloved aunt in hospice, a breath away from the grave. “At holidays, at school breaks, I came back to visit. The 10 stories in “News From Heaven” move chronologically from the town’s modest boom before World War II to its postindustrial depletion as the mines close, one by one: For another kind, it is a stage.” The speaker is a smart high school girl working at the town’s diner, watching “the athletes and beauty queens who’d blossomed early and fierce,” and the setting is Bakerton, a western Pennsylvania coal-mining town, where Jennifer Haigh’s 2005 novel “Baker Towers” was also set.

“For a certain kind of teenager, a small town is a prison.

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