The Air We Breathe

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Overview

A novel of love during wartime from the National Book Award-winning author of Ship Fever.

In Fall 1916, Americans debate whether to enter the European war. "Preparedness parades" march and headlines report German spies. But in an isolated town in the Adirondacks, the danger is barely felt. At Tamarack Lake the focus is on the sick. Wealthy tubercular patients live in private cure cottages; charity patients, mainly immigrants, fill the public sanatorium. For all, time stands still.

An enterprising patient initiates a discussion group. When his well-meaning efforts lead instead to a tragic accident and a terrible betrayal, the war comes home, bringing with it anti-immigrant prejudice and vigilante sentiment. The conjunction of thwarted desires and political tension binds the patients so deeply that, finally, they speak about what's happened in a single voice.

Editorial Reviews

Maureen Corrigan

The Air We Breathe, reads like an elegant ghost story, narrated by a chorus of not-quite-innocent spectral bystanders…Barrett's severe attention to the smallest routines gives us a sense of what it would have been like to have hung suspended for months and even years in a regime of institutionalized inertia that was once the only cure for tuberculosis. The Air We Breathe is a muted tale of terror—terror that was relentlessly tamped down under cold air, milk and enforced rest. In the apprehensive silence that prevails throughout Tamarack Lake, a cough that's suddenly returned is as much cause for panic as an anarchist's bomb.
—The Washington Post

More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews

From The Critics

Picking up connected characters from her 1996 National Book Award-winning story collection Ship Fever, the latest from Barrett follows her Pulitzer Prize finalist Servants of the Map. In the fall of 1916, as the U.S. involvement in WWI looms, the Adirondack town of Tamarack Lake houses a public sanitarium and private "cure cottages" for TB patients. Gossip about roommate changes, nurse visits, cliques and romantic connections dominate relations among the sick-mostly poor European immigrants-when they're not on their porches taking their rest cure. Intrigue increases with the arrival of Leo Marburg, an attractive former chemist from Odessa who has spent his years in New York slaving away at a sugar refinery, and of Miles Fairchild, a pompous and wealthy cure cottage resident who decides to start a discussion group, despite his inability to understand many of his fellow patients. As in Joshua Ferris's recent Then We Came to the End, Barrett narrates with a collective "we," the voice of the crowd of convalescents. Details of New York tenements and of the sanitarium's regime are vivid and engrossing. The plot, which hinges on the coming of WWI, has a lock-step logic, but its transparency doesn't take away from the timeliness of its theme: how the tragedy, betrayal and heartbreak of war extend far beyond the battlefield. (Oct.)

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780393333077
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date: 10/6/2008
Pages: 320
Sales rank: 529,431
Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.30 (h) x 0.90 (d)

Meet the Author

Andrea Barrett

A writer whose novels distill historical fact into historically accurate fiction, Andrea Barrett is as much renowned for her storytelling abilities as for her understanding of the history of science. In her books, the real and the fictitious intertwine, as famous scientists from history make appearances in her delightfully imagined and well-researched stories.

Biography

Andrea Barrett combines, as the critic Michiko Kakutani put it, "a naturalist's eye with a novelist's imagination." For the award-winning novelist and short-story writer, natural science, particularly nineteenth-century natural history, is a central preoccupation, and scientists and naturalists such as Linnaeus, Darwin, and Mendel frequently figure in her work. Barrett herself, however, gave up the study of science shortly after completing an undergraduate degree in biology. She entered a Ph.D. program in zoology but dropped out during the first semester.

Yet the way Barrett writes is, perhaps, her own brand of science; it involves long hours of research and the painstaking distillation of historical fact into historically accurate fiction. By her own admission, Barrett is an obsessive researcher: "Often for a story, I will do enough research to write a couple of novels, and for a novel I'll do enough research to have written an encyclopedia," she said in an interview in The Atlantic. But in the end, she adds, "fiction is about the characters, the image, the language, the poetry, the sound; it isn't about information. The information has to be distilled down to let us focus on what's really going on with the people."

Barrett didn't start writing fiction in earnest until her thirties, and she labored in comparative obscurity until 1996. Then, with four novels already behind her, she won the National Book Award for her first collection of short stories, Ship Fever. The collection explores the romantic and intellectual passions of a variety of historical and fictional characters, from an aging Linnaeus to a pair of contemporary marine biologists. In it, "science is transformed from hard and known fact into malleable, strange and thrilling fictional material," said the Boston Globe.

The book's success launched Barrett into the literary limelight, where her reputation continued to grow. Her next book, The Voyage of the Narwhal, tells the story of a doomed scientific voyage to the Arctic in 1855. The writer Thomas Mallon called it "a brilliant reversal of Heart of Darkness: the danger is not that the characters will 'go native,' but that a lust for scientific knowledge and intellectual distinction will drive them to cruelties they would have been incapable of before."

Recently, Barrett's work has begun to feature recurring characters, some of them related to one another. In another collection of stories, Servants of the Map, several characters from Ship Fever reappear, as does the ship cook from The Voyage of the Narwhal. As Barrett follows the trajectory of their lives and relationships, it is increasingly apparent how attuned she is to the emotional lives, as well as the intellectual lives, of her characters. As Barry Unsworth wrote in The New York Times Book Review, Barrett captures "that blend of precision and appropriateness that has always characterized the best prose, an attentiveness to the truth of human feeling that is in itself a supremely civilized value."

Good To Know

When she isn't writing, Barrett plays African percussion with a group of musicians in Rochester, N.Y. The group includes her husband, the biologist Barry Goldstein.

1. Hometown:
  
  Cape Cod, Massachusetts
1. Date of Birth:
  
  November 16, 1954
2. Place of Birth:
  
  Cape Cod, Massachusetts
1. Education:
  
  B.A., Union College
2. Website:
  
  http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall01/004348.htm

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whiteginger

Posted November 27, 2010

more from this reviewer

One of my favorite reads in long while

The patients of the fictional state-funded Tamarack Sanatorium for TB victims narrate this book as one voice, the voice of "we," a collective first-person omniscient narrator. This tender, poignant voice recalls the years of WWI. Although none of the patients were firm enough to do active service in the war, their story is a touching portrait of how war affects everyone. Leo, the beautifully drawn central character, is only twenty-six when he is placed in the sanatorium. A Russian immigrant with a chemistry background, he has no family and has been unable to find work worthy of his talents and education in America. In the sanatorium the other patients and staff seem drawn to him, but he is shy and quiet. Why is he so secretive? I loved the characters and the historical context woven through the plot. I also enjoyed thoughtful antithesis of ideas--open discussion vs suspicious rumors, scientific progress for good (X-rays) vs scientific progress for evil (poisonous gas warfare), community identity vs individuality. This novel is great reading and would be wonderful for a book club.
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Anonymous

Posted December 3, 2007

A reviewer

This is an excellent book. Learning about life in those times, at TB institutions, and the character development was extraordinary. It was very emotional at times and I could actually feel what the people were feeling as everything was described so eloquently. This book really held my interest and I've been so bored lately with most 'best sellers'.
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