Andrea Barrett has a jones for the cold. The author of the Arctic-exploration chronicle The Voyage of the Narwhal and the new novel The Air We Breathe recalls the Adirondack ski treks and winter camping trips she took with her husband when global warming was less severe. “We used to go cross-country skiing when it was 25, 28 below zero without the windchill,” she says nostalgically. “I love that feeling, so cold the snot freezes.”
It was in Saranac Lake that Barrett first noticed an odd architectural feature: large buildings with dozens of open-air “cure porches,” built for tubercular patients who came to the Adirondacks in the early 1900s for a regime of bed rest, abundant nutrition, and fresh mountain air, no matter how chilly.
This fascination led to “The Cure,” the extraordinary last story in her collection Servants of the Map, a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. Many writers might feel they’d exhausted the subject, but like a polar explorer on a fresh quest, Barrett revisits the lives of tubercular patients and healers in The Air We Breathe.
Tamarack State is a government-run institution whose patients have been forcibly removed from epidemic-prone New York City during the winter of 1916-17. The US is poised to enter The Great War, and revolution is brewing in Russia (homeland of many Tamarack patients, including chemist Leo Marburg, linchpin in the complex construction of crisscrossed romantic fixations that detonate the novel’s climax). Many of Leo’s fellow patients are immigrant laborers, and the enforced idleness of the rest cure spawns a dangerous level of boredom. When a rich industrialist, curing at a nearby private cottage, proposes a weekly discussion session in the mode of then-fashionable “workers’ circles,” many patients sign on enthusiastically. Neither the discussion group nor its leader turns out as expected.
Barrett has said she envisioned the novel as a “low-rent, democratic version of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain,” but its parallels with E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime are equally striking: Many strands of social, political, and technological change interweave in a complex tapestry of indelible characters. Barrett’s is also a world in which women, refreshingly, operate heavy machinery as well as their male counterparts. Cars are still a novelty item that few can drive; X-rays and movies are technological miracles. All will feature prominently in the debacle that gives The Air We Breathe its narrative tension.
Six feet tall and angular, her face framed by a nimbus of wavy white hair, Barrett paints herself as a gawky klutz. Her description of winning the National Book Award for her first story collection, Ship Fever, sounds like a Chaplin one-reeler. The nomination shocked her. “The first edition of 6,000 had sold out, and we were delighted by that, certainly expected nothing more. The NBAs are like a bookish version of the Academy Awards, except they feed you. The nominees sit at tables and someone says, literally, ‘And the winner is….’ It was perfectly terrifying. No one expected my book to win. We were sitting against the back wall, eating hors d’oeuvres. I heard my name and spit food from my mouth—in the movies, they call it a ‘spit take.’”
Barrett, who’d never attended a black-tie event, had also forgotten her glasses, and tripped over Calvin Trillin’s feet on her way to the microphone. “I’m both shy and awkward—I’ve had most of it beaten out of me over the years, but back then . . . I was 41, but I had the social skills of a shy 22-year-old.” To this day, she’s intimidated by book touring and hates photo sessions, even with her photographer-husband, Barry Goldstein. “I don’t like being seen in that way,” she explains. “My work and myself are two different things. I’m really a domestic creature of habit, very dull. I walk the dog at the same time every day. I write every morning.”
This need for routine may be a response to an overly turbulent childhood. Barrett grew up on Cape Cod, in an ever-changing series of homes in Bourne, Pocasset, Barnstable—always “within sniffing range” of the ocean. Her father worked as a real-estate broker in Boston. An accomplished ski racer and ski patrolman, he named his daughter after Olympic medalist Andrea Mead Lawrence, carrying her downhill in a backpack and putting her on skis as soon as she could walk. Barrett’s grandfather helped to develop Vermont’s Mount Snow resort, and the family drove there every winter weekend.
Barrett’s parents divorced when she was 12. Both remarried, plunging her into a complex, blended family with numerous step- and half-siblings. She left home for Schenectady’s Union College before finishing high school. Barrett’s fictional universe is full of extended families, adoptions, and unconventional relationships. In the elegant family tree at the back of The Air We Breathe, “strong ties beyond blood or marriage” are charted by dotted lines.
“That family tree has been growing for about 12 years now,” Barrett says. “I have an enormous cast of characters in my brain at this point. I think of them as being in some giant barn in western Pennsylvania. I can open the door and listen in on who’s talking, and take out some shard to bring home with me.”
Why western Pennsylvania? “I don’t know why,” she marvels. “I’ve never even been there.” Maybe by warehousing her characters in a place that exists only in her imagination, the author is free to relocate them as precisely as possible. “I can’t write anything, really, until I can see the environment. If it’s on a seashore, what seashore? What’s the weather like? What’s the plant life, the bird life?” Her obsession with detail—the texture of period fabrics, the right tree budding at the right time—can make for a long research period.
Barrett is also a rabid reviser. In a 2003 Paris Review interview, she called her first drafts “staggeringly bad,” often bearing no resemblance to the final text. A late adapter to the computer, she prints frequently, “using embarrassing amounts of paper,” and revises in longhand, using different-colored pencils and inks. When the page becomes nearly illegible, she retypes it and repeats the process, usually more than once. “I don’t seem to understand how to do this other than by this kind of sedimentary process,” she says. “The way I work is not efficient, but writing is not about efficiency.”
Barrett reassures her students about the variety of writers’ approaches. “Process is very individual; there is no right way.” She’s taught in the pioneering low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College since 1993, and currently teaches at Williams College. She and Goldstein live in North Adams, Massachusetts, in a 19th-century textile mill converted into living space for artists. Barrett’s writing room, a small brick-walled enclave off the main loft, was once a workers’ bathroom—possibly the sort that bosses once feared would breed Bolsheviks.
Some critics separate Barrett’s output into an early quartet of largely contemporary, relationship-based novels (Lucid Stars, Secret Harmonies, The Middle Kingdom, and Forms of Water) and a later quartet (The Voyage of the Narwhal, Ship Fever, Servants of the Map, and The Air We Breathe) that share a fixation with science, exploration, and history. Barrett doesn’t feel the divide is so clear, but acknowledges that the latter books are interrelated by a complex network of characters. Though each work is written to stand on its own for a first-time reader, frequent flyers find a subtle frisson of pleasure in realizing that, for example, hospital maid Eudora in The Air We Breathe is the niece of Elizabeth, a leading character in “The Cure” and descendant of Nora and Ned Kynd, who left that western Pennsylvania barn to appear in Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal.
The breathtaking complexity of Barrett’s vision earned her a MacArthur “genius grant” in 2001. In addition to its baroque genealogy, The Air We Breathe is narrated by a “we” that the reader gradually realizes is not an individual speaking for many, but the collective voice of Tamarack’s community of patients. “That collective ‘we’ was insanely troublesome,” Barrett says, adding rather plaintively that “it doesn’t work for everyone.”
Barrett is quick to correct the popular misconception of her as a scientist-turned-author. “I never really worked as a scientist. I studied science; I thought I would be a scientist when I was very young.” She did marry a scientist—Goldstein is a biophysicist whose photography career has soared in recent years—and retains a kinship with scientific discourse. “The scientists I know are wildly creative. It’s a mode of thinking in every way as creative as any writer or artist, with the same unexpected leaps and intuition, the sense of something just beyond what you know.”
Might one hypothesize that writers employ the same mental process, but gather and analyze imaginary data? Barrett responds, “But is it imaginary data? We’re drawing on our real knowledge of real people and their characters, not in a literal way but drawing metaphors, using our imagination in the way we recombine them. But the atoms of that knowledge are real. I’m a very unautobiographical writer, literally—I write about Darwin, Linnaeus, 80-year-old former monks, Russian-Jewish immigrants. How could I do that except by using atoms of the real world and building molecules of fiction from them?”
Fiction as organic chemistry: The metaphor excites her. “You take the carbon molecules and heat them and something happens,” Andrea Barrett enthuses. Sometimes, as in The Air We Breathe, the result is literary dynamite.
This article appears in December 2007.
