The challenge with such a political, and heavily populated novel like shopping mall are carved out' - that's when most folks in Bakerton realize they've been royally fracked. The natural gas boom goes bust and Dark Elephant drill workers (some of whom we've gotten to know) are laid off and stiffed on their last paycheck after the old hardwood forests are cut down and muddy clearings 'the size of. Who would say no to such easy money, right? But the regrets skyrocket a couple of years later, after the tap water gets funky and residents begin suffering from rashes and boils, memory loss and miscarriages. In return, the farmers get a leasing bonus up front and a percentage of future profits.

He claims the drill will run so far beneath the land that farming can go on as usual. In simple two-minute pitches, the salesman offers farmers around Bakerton a sweet deal, whereby Dark Elephant leases their land, drills into what he calls 'Nature's safe-deposit box' and releases the treasure of natural gas. The novel opens in 2010, when a salesman comes to town representing a Texas company called Dark Elephant Energy. The central story revolves around fracking - the method by which natural gas trapped underground in shale rock is released through drilling and the injection of a high-pressure mixture of water, chemicals and sand. Heat and Light is an exquisitely designed, semi-satirical social novel featuring a cast of at least 15 main characters. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Haigh does here for Bakerton - and the obscure real-life locales it's based on - in this, our own era of 'fracking frenzy.' What Tom Wolfe did for the New York City of the so-called, 'go-go '80s' in Heat and Light is her most ambitious - and compelling - novel yet. It's a place she's brought to life so scrupulously that she can delve deep, both into the minds and family histories of her mostly working-class characters, as well as into the land itself and the stories it contains. Heat and Light she's paying a more extended visit.įor Haigh, Bakerton is becoming something akin to Faulkner's apocryphal Yoknapatawpha County. Haigh returned to Bakerton a few years ago in her short story collection,

She was born in the coal country of Western Pennsylvania and her 2005 best-selling novel,īaker Towers, traced the rise and fall of the fictional coal town, Bakerton, in the years following World War II. Haigh knows a lot about 'what lies beneath' in Pennsylvania. 'More than most places, Pennsylvania is what lies beneath.' That's a line Jennifer Haigh places at the beginning and the end of her latest novel,

Heat and light haigh