The Air We Breathe
By Andrea Barrett
Norton, 299 pages, $24.95
Novelists choose from an array of lenses through which to view the world, and one of the most magnifying is disease. Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th Century “Decameron,” a suite of stories told by 10 men and women who have quarantined themselves from the Black Death, launched a literary tradition in which plagues of the body mirror grave social ills.
Andrea Barrett, who came to fiction by way of biology, has extracted profound drama from the history of epidemics, particularly in imagining the courageous men and women who have done battle against microbes in the lab and as healers, caring for patients with valor and tenderness. In “Ship Fever,” the title story in her National Book Award-winning collection, Barrett portrays a Canadian doctor and a shipload of Irish immigrants caught up in the horrors of a typhus outbreak. In “The Cure,” the final story in “Servants of the Map,” Barrett’s previous book, she takes readers to the Adirondacks, where tuberculosis sufferers hope for rescue in the clean cold air. The beauty of the region, the mystery of the rest cure and the curious relationships that coalesce in this meticulously controlled limbo proved so compelling, Barrett went on to write “The Air We Breathe,” a novel about life in an Adirondacks sanitarium during World War I.
This continuance from one book to another is natural for Barrett. Not only do characters resurface, readers also meet their relatives, descendants and loved ones. In this case, one also assumes Barrett was influenced by Thomas Mann’s masterpiece, “The Magic Mountain,” which is set in a sanitarium in the Swiss Alps and shaped by events leading up to World War I. Barrett may have intended her novel to be an American variation on Mann’s themes, a tall order to be sure.
Like Mann’s novel, Barrett’s is a bildungsroman, a novel of education, although hers is a tale of the moral and spiritual growth of a group of people rather than one central character. Given her fascination with the scientific mind, it’s no surprise she has filled the imaginary Tamarack State Sanatorium for the Treatment of Tuberculosis with people deeply curious about the living world and about how things work. But because this is a state facility its patients are poor, and most are immigrants, so their aspirations have been thwarted if not dashed.
Take Leo, the new guy. He is a romantically handsome immigrant from Russia of German and Polish descent who finds meaning and glory in chemistry, but the only jobs he has found in America involve dirty and dangerous hard labor. Now stricken with TB, he tries to adjust to a surreal routine of enforced stillness and quiet.
As their bodies rest, the patients’ minds race, and soon the ambulatory among them assemble for Wednesday seminars convened by Miles Fairchild, a small man with a large sense of entitlement. The wealthy owner of a cement factory, he is taking the cure at a private cottage in town run by a determined widow with the reluctant help of Naomi, her attractive but untrustworthy daughter. Naomi has learned to drive and is happy to earn some money as Miles’ chauffeur, until he begins to court her. Just as Miles is indifferent to the acute boredom of his captive audience as he drones on about paleontology, he never understands that his wealth is not enough to seduce Naomi. But she is much like Miles, a narcissist in the grip of unrequited love, as her obsession with Leo intensifies and turns malignant.
Naomi’s friend, Eudora, an energetic and upbeat ward maid at the sanitarium, has come down with a different form of ardor: She is enthralled by the X-ray process. The lab director, Irene, a Polish immigrant whose mother died of consumption and who herself had a mild case of tuberculosis, was so dedicated to mastering the X-ray process and so uninformed about the dangers of radiation, like Marie Curie, she severely damaged her hands. Grateful for Eudora’s interest, she teaches her everything she knows, and Eudora becomes a veritable X-ray artist. But for all her technical acuity, Eudora doesn’t pick up on Miles’ growing frustration with Naomi, the intensity of Naomi’s fixation on Leo, or Leo’s strong attraction to Eudora. It is this squared puzzle of desire and love that sets disastrous events in motion.
The patients soon take charge of the Wednesday gatherings, which become far more engaging and edifying as more characters come into focus. Which brings us to the novel’s use of the first-person plural narrative voice, the collective “we.” Barrett has a chorus of patients tell the story retrospectively.
For instance, as the first Wednesday meeting is about to begin, “we entered the solarium to find a slight man, with the same concave chest that many of us had.” This, of course, is Miles, and Naomi and Leo are also present. In one of many instances of foreshadowing, the narrating chorus notes, “This was her first sight of him, but none of us noticed if she stared or blushed.” Not only is Barrett using this conspicuous voice – – which can be ironic or plangent, but is most often awkward and intrusive – – she also allows her narrators to analyze their work: “Sometimes we split into factions, half of us disagreeing with the other half over how to relate these events.” This device makes for an oddly passive, detached, even sluggish novel. But Barrett is a skillful writer, so the reader can only assume she was trying to evoke the strangely muffled, cocoonlike ambience and lassitude of the sanitarium.
Barrett’s characters are intriguing and often amusing; their isolation and helplessness as the world is consumed by a new, virulent form of war is poignant. Barrett drives this point home with a doctor’s harrowing description of German gas attacks and what poisonous gas does to the lungs of victims, details that leave the group of TB sufferers appalled.
And then there’s Miles’ mutation from an arrogant bore spurned by the woman he desires into a flag-waving vigilante at once ludicrous and scary. As the head of the local chapter of the American Protection League, he stokes prejudice and fear, fumes about the unprotected border with Canada and violates the rights of immigrants and other allegedly suspicious individuals. Thanks to Naomi’s snooping and a package Leo has been keeping for a friend that confirms Miles’ worst nightmares (or perhaps his most pleasurable fantasies), the little dictator even invades the sanitarium, which has already suffered terrible losses in a suspicious fire. Gradually, the murmuring and gentle “we” morphs into a far more sinister entity. As they confess:
“No single person, we thought, had done anything so terrible. Yet together, without noticing exactly what was happening, we’d contributed to destroying our own world.”
The parallels to our times are undeniable, the lessons clear, and most readers will embrace Barrett’s humanist perspective. But most of us look to fiction for more-subtle and open-ended interpretations of the complexities of the life. We don’t want fiction to tell us what to think. Instead, we seek aesthetic arrest, intellectual electricity and powerful emotions. Barrett, a writer of deep knowledge and extraordinary literary gifts, has created an X-ray instead of a flesh-and-blood novel. While we might wish she had taken a different approach, in accepting the book in hand, we do appreciate its revelation of hidden intricacies and connections. We recognize the metaphoric resonance of its shadowy spectrum. We perceive wit, compassion and truth, and we’re willing to imagine that our longing for more echoes the yearning of Barrett’s ailing, ensconced and repentant collective.
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Donna Seaman is an editor for Booklist, creator of the anthology “In Our Nature” and host for the radio program “Open Books” on WLUW 88.7 FM and www.openbooksradio.org. Her author interviews are collected in “Writers on the Air.”
