Heat and Light (39 page)
Authors: Jennifer Haigh
Long ago, in the navy, Rich Devlin learned his place in the world, his basic and inescapable smallness. Military life taught you this truth. He turned nineteen aboard the SS
Rooseveltâ
the Big Stick, they called it, a ship so massive it seemed to be standing still as it carried six thousand men, three times the population of Bakerton, to the Persian Gulf, a distant and desolate place that mattered for one reason only. When he thinks of it now, he imagines the Big Stick gliding across a vast sea of other people's money, a thought that didn't occur to him at the time.
We are all sailors.
M
uch has been written on the subject of gas drilling. I am indebted to Seamus McGraw's remarkable memoir,
The End of Country;
Gregory Zuckerman's
The Frackers,
and Josh Fox's two-part documentary
Gasland,
which offer three very differentâand to my mind, essentialâperspectives on the issue.
Heat and Light
is a book about the world. Writing it demanded many different kinds of knowledge no novelist actually possesses. I am indebted to those who schooled me.
Pamela Twiss at California University of Pennsylvania and the Northern Appalachia Network shared valuable insights about what gas drilling means for communities. But for our conversation several years ago, and others since, this book would not have been written.
Atul Gawande, Lori Wirth, and Ben Scheindlin answered my incessant medical questions. Kenneth Cain and Mike Konior taught me about crime and punishment. Liz Diehl gave me a crash course in organic dairy farming. Mike Brennan, Mike Jennings, Andy Rodriguez, and Brian Fink shared their experiences of working on a drill rig. Greg McIsaac helped me understand the peculiar geology of western Pennsylvania. Carrie and Michael Kline taught me to listen in a new and powerful way.
My editor at Ecco, the great and good Daniel Halpern, helped me build a better mousetrap. Dan Pope, Sheri Joseph, Dorian Karchmar, and Megan Lynch waded through early drafts and helped me through the weeds.
Rob Arnold believed in the machine.
Julian and Patti Adams gave me Truro in a blizzard, the greatest writing retreat of my life. The Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Danish Centre for Writers and Translators, and the Dora Maar Foundation provided optimal writing conditions and stimulating fellowship. It's a miracle I ever left.
Finally, a special thanks to my publishing family at HarperCollins, especially Michael Morrison and Jonathan Burnham, for their understanding and support.
Heat and Light
owes a particular debt to two books that came before it,
Baker Towers
and
News from Heaven.
Neither would have come into the world without the immeasurable generosity of Claire Wachtel at Harper. My gratitude is unending.
JENNIFER HAIGH
is the author of the short-story collection
News from Heaven
and four critically acclaimed novels:
Faith, The Condition, Baker Towers,
and
Mrs. Kimble
. Her books have won both the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction and the PEN/L.L. Winship Award for work by a New England writer. Her short fiction has been published widely, in
The Atlantic, Granta, The Best American Short Stories,
and many other places. She lives in Boston.
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Cover design and illustration by Jim Tierney
HEAT AND LIGHT.
Copyright © 2016 by Jennifer Haigh. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Illustrations by Jim Tierney
ISBN 978-0-06-176329-8
EPub Edition MAY 2016 ISBN 9780062199089
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