Baker Towers

Categories: Fiction

My to-be-read shelf is so overloaded that I'm starting to feel guilty about it, so I haven't gotten in line yet for Jennifer Haigh's new book, The Condition.  But I remember her last one, Baker Towers, very fondly.  It was one of those quiet books that doesn't seem like much when you describe the plot but has an emotional resonance that stays with you.

So let me describe the plot anyway!  The Novaks are a family in a little Pennsylvania mining town.  Rose is the Italian bride of a Polish miner, so she doesn't fit tidily into the town's social circles.  Widowed young, she raises three daughters, Dorothy, Joyce, and Lucy.  Each of the girls has to make decisions about whether to stay in their hometown or venture out into the wide world:  Dorothy sees government service during World War II, Joyce dreams of escaping but finds it hard to cut family ties, and Lucy, much younger than her sisters, sees the town dying after the mines close. 

The novel moves among all four women's viewpoints, and other characters briefly take up the narrative thread.  Nothing momentous in terms of the outside world happens to them, but the full cycle of births and marriages and careers and deaths of course does, and the lives of these ordinary people are deeply absorbing.  If you enjoy regional fiction, you'll like the Pennsylvania mine country setting, too.  It's all low-key, but beautifully, fondly rendered.