First, there's That Voice.
Although Barrett's new novel, "The Air We Breathe," is told in the first person, the narration suggests omniscience. Private conversations are reproduced, characters' thoughts, emotions, desires reported. What sort of narration is this?
The tale opens in a sanitorium in the Adirondacks for indigent tuberculosis patients in the days leading up to the World War I. The narrator seems not to be a patient, but all the patients; Barrett's use of the word "we," as in "We had a sense, then, of what our circle might be. Of what we might be," is literal. The voice, the very consciousness, is that of a collective.
Most of the patients are recent immigrants, rounded up - tuberculosis was a serious threat to public health, and thrived among the urban poor - and sent to this public institution more or less against their will. The "cure" seems odd to us now: Huge meals, no exercise of any kind and long days and weeks and months sitting outside, immobile on freezing, wind-swept porches, wrapped in threadbare blankets, breathing pure mountain air.
The sanitorium, however, is for poor people. Nearby, upscale "cure cottages" care for the rich.
Things other than TB can incubate in such Petri dishes. And when the forced isolation, the near-maddening boredom is shattered by the intrusion of a well-meaning industrialist and amateur paleontologist taking the cure at a local cottage, personalities - and class conflict - begin first to simmer, then to edge toward a boil.
The industrialist, Miles, hoping to spark some life in his less-fortunate fellows, begins a weekly discussion group, the topics to be ... anything. He opens things up with a series of stultifying, detail-sodden lectures on his dinosaur-bone-hunting expeditions out West, talks that fall just short of actually killing some of the patients.
But Miles has underestimated them; many of these immigrants - men and women - were educated, and educated well, in their home countries. They not only have ideas of their own, but some of these ideas are alien: collective farms, for example; unions. With the rumors of war, and whisper of European spies and saboteurs, this group of innocent and pale-looking foreigners begins to look ... suspicious. Some of them, particularly those with scientific backgrounds, bear watching. And Miles is nothing if not a patriot.
Although comparisons to "The Magic Mountain" are inevitable - TB, mountain sanitorium - Barrett's lineage can be traced more directly to C.P. Snow than to Thomas Mann. In her series of novels and short stories (the best known of which are "Ship Fever," "Voyage of the Narwhal" and "Servants of the Map") she is, over time, painstakingly but fluidly and brilliantly, piecing together a cultural Missing Link: the linchpin of collective thought that captures the electrifying moments in time when our perception of the world tilted from superstition to science.
Barrett's characters exist in that flash - more of a light going rapidly from dim to dazzling, really - of collective insight. Although all but drunk on the natural sciences, her footing as a storyteller is sure. It is startling to look back after reading one of her novels or stories and realize how little actually happened, in the way of kinetic action or turns of major events. Amazing because every page seems so vibrant, its people so alive. That, in the end, is what's happening: Her people are living.
Finally, there's That Voice: Barrett's. Like Philip Roth and a handful of other great writers, she crafts frictionless prose, on which a reader can glide great distances in a astonishingly short space of time. And the view is majestic, breathtaking, thrilling. When all her works are collected, she'll be up there with, or maybe a half cut above, Roth, and Updike, and Malamud and ...
You name him or her. I name Andrea Barrett.
- Arthur Salm
