Ms. 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 lineup of her admirers. With this book, she moves one big step closer to being in their league…Heat and Light …is really a deftly interwoven set of stories. There's suspense in the way they eventually connect…Once Ms. 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.
The New York Times - Janet Maslin
05/23/2016 For her excellent sixth work of fiction, Haigh (The Condition) returns to the mortally wounded mining town of Bakerton, Pa., peopled by unsettled folks whose ennui seems genetic, even in the wake of what might be a renaissance as the town begins exploiting a massive deposit of natural gas. Prison guard Rich Devlin signs over the mineral rights to his Pap's farm, hoping for a better life for himself, his wife, Shelby, and their chronically ill daughter, Olivia. Pastor Jess, the widow of Pastor Wes, counsels the hypochondriac Shelby, but begins to unravel herself as she becomes involved with Herc, a member of the Texan drilling crew whom the townspeople resent as noisy outsiders. The Devlins' neighbors, Mack and Rena, are organic dairy farmers whose customers begin to fall away as rumor spreads of contamination from the new drilling. And Gia, the waitress at Rich's dad's bar, has a drug problem that no one but Rich's brother, Darren, a recovering addict himself, can see. The author has deftly, and with few false notes, created a geography of connections among the townspeople, who are brothers, daughters, high school sweethearts, and strangers. Haigh has conjured stories of great consequence out of rural Pennsylvania, observing that "more than most places, Pennsylvania is what lies beneath." She has tapped the deep well of the human condition and relayed something profound about America at the turn of the 21st century. (May)
“Ms. 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...With this book, she moves one big step closer to being in their league.” — Janet Maslin, New York Times
“We finally have a novel - and a novelist - whose ambitions match the scale of this subject…a tour-de-force of multiple point-of-view narration…DeLillo-esque…Haigh’s achievement in this expansive, gripping novel is to delineate the ways in which we are all connected, for better and worse. — The Washington Post
The novel is not an environmental treatise masked as fiction; rather, it’s a perfectly paced rendering of the intertwined characters’ personal stories. Haigh smoothly switches between past and present, fully exposing that, indeed, the past is not even past. This is a must-read... — Booklist (starred review)
“Each page glimmers…Sweeping yet intimate, Heat and Light is an exemplar of fiction’s capacity to awaken us to truth.” — O, the Oprah Magazine
“Paragraph by paragraph, the prose is full of marvelous texture and material sensation. Heat and Light is an intricate and ambitious novel, firmly grounded in history and our time. The narrator’s encyclopedic knowledge and keen insights about the physical world and social life make the novel a thrilling page turner.” — Ha Jin, National Book Award-winning author of WAITING
“...a stunning book, a grand book, a book of old-fashioned power and scale...it takes aim at power and greed, plunder and the profit motive, the rapacity inherent in the American Dream and the complicity of its victims..This is an unsparing book, and one that sings.” — Joshua Ferris, author of THEN WE CAME TO THE END
“Heat and Light is a riveting panoramic tale keying... In the spirit of Don DeLillo’s Underworld and the novels of Dana Spiotta and Rachel Kushner...a greyhound of a novel; smart, sharp, hyper precise, and near incantatory in its momentum.” — Richard Price
“Heat and Light achieves pure novelistic virtuosity. It’s brilliant beginning to end.” — Richard Ford
Heat and Light achieves pure novelistic virtuosity. It’s brilliant beginning to end.
Paragraph by paragraph, the prose is full of marvelous texture and material sensation. Heat and Light is an intricate and ambitious novel, firmly grounded in history and our time. The narrator’s encyclopedic knowledge and keen insights about the physical world and social life make the novel a thrilling page turner.
The novel is not an environmental treatise masked as fiction; rather, it’s a perfectly paced rendering of the intertwined characters’ personal stories. Haigh smoothly switches between past and present, fully exposing that, indeed, the past is not even past. This is a must-read...
Booklist (starred review)
...a stunning book, a grand book, a book of old-fashioned power and scale...it takes aim at power and greed, plunder and the profit motive, the rapacity inherent in the American Dream and the complicity of its victims..This is an unsparing book, and one that sings.
Heat and Light is a riveting panoramic tale keying... In the spirit of Don DeLillo’s Underworld and the novels of Dana Spiotta and Rachel Kushner...a greyhound of a novel; smart, sharp, hyper precise, and near incantatory in its momentum.
Each page glimmers…Sweeping yet intimate, Heat and Light is an exemplar of fiction’s capacity to awaken us to truth.
We finally have a novel - and a novelist - whose ambitions match the scale of this subject…a tour-de-force of multiple point-of-view narration…DeLillo-esque…Haigh’s achievement in this expansive, gripping novel is to delineate the ways in which we are all connected, for better and worse.
Ms. 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...With this book, she moves one big step closer to being in their league.
Each page glimmers…Sweeping yet intimate, Heat and Light is an exemplar of fiction’s capacity to awaken us to truth.
2016-02-18 Haigh, who wrote a morally complex, narrowly focused book about the hot-button issue of child molestation by Catholic priests in Faith (2011), takes a broader approach in this sprawling, thickly populated novel about fracking. The setting is Bakerton, Pennsylvania, the fictional former mining town that was the subject of Haigh's elegiac affection in Baker's Towers (2005). In 2010, the town is full of vacant storefronts and financially struggling citizens when "landmen" arrive and start convincing local landowners to sign leases with Dark Elephant Energy allowing the Houston company to dig for natural gas along the Marcellus Shale. Chief executive Kip Oliphant is a caricature of a glad-handing wheeler-dealer Texas tycoon, always looking for the "Next Big Play." He's too easy a villain, and neither his divorce woes nor his ridiculously nicknamed friends play as funny as they're meant to. There's even less humor in Bakerton. Prison guard Rich Devlin and his dissatisfied wife, Shelby, a neurotically protective mother, are one of the first to sign a lease—for too little money per acre, they soon learn. Then the digging noise begins to keep them awake, their water turns undrinkable, and their sickly daughter gets sicker (or does she?). Meanwhile at the organic dairy farm next door, lesbian partners Mack and Rena refuse to sign. Rena is soon drawn into the larger anti-fracking movement and finds herself dangerously attracted to a male activist. A supporting cast includes deadbeats, shysters, meth-heads, preachers, and assorted troubled neighbors and relatives, each given his or her moment center-stage. Haigh is as wonderful as ever at capturing emotional undercurrents—Rich's backyard family barbecue is classic—but her humor is often flat-footed, her message obvious, and her tone preachy even for those in agreement. This ambitious but flawed attempt at a 21st-century Dickensian novel shows how difficult it is to write convincing polemical fiction.