Change and Second Chances: Readings from Three Novels

Set in a former Pennsylvania mining town that gets a second chance, courtesy of natural gas, Jennifer Haigh‘s novel Heat and Light depicts a community blessed and cursed by its natural resources. Even on the bucolic Lombard family’s sprawling apple orchard, change is inevitable, and threats of urbanization, disinheritance, and women’s rites of passage soon shake the orchard down to its roots, in Jane Hamilton‘s The Excellent Lombards. In Joyce Maynard’s Under the Influence, a recovering alcoholic must choose between her friends’ offer to help her regain custody of her seven year-old son, and telling the truth about an accident involving her friends’ grown son and the child of their maid.