Jennifer Haigh

Jennifer Haigh’s Faith touches nerves that leave the reader squirming a bit. Haigh’s examination of family dynamics and dysfunction reaches into that place in our minds where we hold our family secrets, the secrets that perhaps no one else would even care about but are there nonetheless because we cover them with the shame we’ve been told we should feel. She examines the McGann family’s journey through life including their family secrets and the secrets they keep from one another in show more the name of protecting the family while drawing an interesting parallel to the secrets that are kept to protect people’s faith. The parallel between the main character’s brother’s unwillingness to defend himself against accusations in order to keep another secret seem both sacrificial and selfish at the same time. While at times the reader may want to stop reading due to the subject matter, Haigh draws the reader into the lives of the McGanns so much the reader has to know what happens next. The McGann family is so real in their struggles, their secrets, their faith, and their dysfunction, they could be the family next door or the reader’s own if the reader is brave enough to admit it. show less

No one creates more believable, true-to-life characters in their fiction than Jennifer Haigh. Period. And I am a stone cold fan of character driven novels. Which is why I have worked my way steadily through Haigh's complete oeuvre, although not in the order they were published. THE CONDITION (2008) is the sixth Haigh novel I've read, and its characters - and their story - are simply outstanding. Frank and Paulette McKotch and their three children - Billy, Gwen and Scott - all suffer from show more their own particular "conditions," which, in the end, amount to nothing more than the human condition. Frank is a successful scientist and academic workaholic at MIT who hails from the coal fields of Pennsylvania, and has worked his way up from the bottom. (His character represents a tenuous tie to Haigh's other works about the town and people of Bakerton, that began with BAKER TOWERS.) He has "married up." Paulette is from a blueblood Boston family whose fortunes have been frittered away one generation at a time. The family implodes in 1976 when they learn of thirteen year-old Gwen's "condition" - Turner syndrome, which inhibits normal growth, puberty and maturation. Twenty years later we see how the family has splintered and changed, and follow their separate fortunes. I hesitate to say any more, just because I don't want to spoil it for any other readers who love great CHARACTERS. I can't stop thinking about the McKotch family. They are all just THAT real. I LOVED this book! One more Haigh novel left to read. Must find a copy of MRS. KIMBLE. (And I hope there's another one coming soon.) My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

Need to re-read this! This book hit for so many reasons and would love to go back and re-read it. I can't even remember all the references now. But this is on my list to purchase, especially if I see it discounted somewhere or in a library sale.

Claire and Aaron Litvak are four years divorced — bitterly — when they get the call that their 22-year-old daughter Lindsey has been hit by a car in Shanghai and is in a coma. They were told she was there teaching English on a gap year from show more Wesleyan. That turns out to be approximately half the truth. They fly to Shanghai, which neither of them can navigate — the language, the heat, the apps, the scale of it — and hover at Lindsey's bedside piecing together who she's actually been. Meanwhile, 11-year-old Grace, Lindsey's younger sister who was adopted from a Chinese orphanage, is stuck at a Quaker summer camp in New Hampshire being carefully shielded from what's happening. Grace is the heart of the book — she and Lindsey have an extraordinarily close bond, and the novel's title comes from the Mid-Autumn Festival and the moon the sisters both look at to feel connected across distance. The Litvaks are a very particular type of liberal Newton, Massachusetts family — the kind with opinions about every American export while carrying their own contradictions everywhere they go. Haigh wrote the book while living in Shanghai on a fellowship, and the city is rendered beautifully.

[May contain spoilers]
Lindsey wasn't teaching English. She was working as an escort for a madam named Mei, who got her into the Shanghai underworld through a series of seemingly glamorous steps — cocktail parties, wealthy men, a lifestyle she found intoxicating until it trapped her. The event that ended her parents' marriage was a relationship she had as a teenager with Dean Farrell, a family friend thirty years her senior. Claire blamed Aaron's emotional distance; Aaron blamed Claire's suffocating control; Lindsey blamed them both. The accident is random — the intersection of bad timing and bad luck — though it comes directly out of the life she'd been living. Grace eventually learns everything, and it's her voice that closes the book, reflecting on causality and chance as an older woman. Lindsey survives but the ending is deliberately not tidy — the family is altered, not fixed. The novel ends at a Christmas wedding in Boston. show less

This book is about Claudia, who has run the clinic on Mercy Street for years, during the winter Boston was hit by snowstorm after snowstorm. She's never been afraid and sometimes argues with the protestors who stake out the entrance and yell at the women attempting to access the clinic's many services. She has a weed dealer named Timmy she visits now and again. Timmy fell into the job a long time ago and now that his son is a teenager, he's thinking that it's past time for him to start a show more legitimate business and make a life where his son could come and live with him. Anthony also visits Timmy. He hasn't been the same since a workplace accident put him on disability, but the weed helps with the vertigo and the headaches. Anthony found a place to belong in his local church and a priest has him running an anti-abortion website for him. He has a friend he only knows by his internet name, and who has asked him to take pictures of women entering the clinic on Mercy Street for him.

Haigh does a great job with the structure of taking unconnected characters and gradually showing how they relate to one another and putting those characters on a collision course. And while the novel centers on a women's clinic and the people it serves, this isn't a book that exists to drive home a political point. The characters are all so believable and human, from the drug dealer to the guy with very unfortunate views about women. I've read a few of Haigh's novels now and I've enjoyed the thoughtful way she approaches polarizing subject matter in every one. show less