The Air We Breathe

By Andrea Barrett

W.W. Norton & Company

320 pages

 

FICTION is dead, or so we are told, ad nauseam, often by those who are supposed to be its advocates. It’s not dead, of course, but its readers have been balkanized almost to the point where it has become irrelevant. Through niche marketing, the novel has been drained of its importance. A case in point is Andrea Barrett’s latest work, The Air We Breathe. Set from late July of 1916 to the winter of 1917-18, and technically a historical novel, it might better be described as a historical-feminist-science-textbook novel. Or perhaps a novel-as-metaphor-only, a species that has lately engulfed fiction like so much kudzu.

Barrett’s story takes place in Tamarack Lake, a fictionalized version of Saranac Lake, where tuberculosis victims convalesce, in varying degrees of privacy and comfort, in hopes that the crisp upland air will heal their infected lungs. One of these sufferers, a cement plant owner named Miles Fairchild, takes it upon himself to start a weekly discussion group—or more accurately, a weekly series of self-improvement lectures—at a state sanitarium for indigent TB patients. Miles envisions this as a bit of lordly largesse as well as a chance to indulge himself, both in lecturing the inmates on his particular obsession, the retrieval of dinosaur fossils, and in courting his driver, Naomi Martin, the dangerously frustrated 18-year-old daughter of his landlady at a village boardinghouse.

He gets much more than he bargained for. The weekly meetings liberate the spirits of the inmates, heretofore smothered under the strict regimen of the sanitarium. They also set in motion a fateful love quadrangle involving Miles, Naomi and Leo Marburg, an immigrant from Russia with whom Naomi becomes completely infatuated—but who has eyes only for her close friend Eudora MacEachern, a ward maid at the sanitarium.

Their smoldering passions and jealousies are soon ignited, literally. The son of Miles’s best friend, a teenage boy whom Miles loved with a devotion that may or may not have been wholly platonic, is killed on the Western Front. Combined with Miles’s unrequited ardor for Naomi, the young man’s death turns the factory owner into a patriotic martinet once the United States follows Europe into the maw of World War I. He becomes a local leader of the American Protective League, a noxious nativist organization that took advantage of the war to persecute labor unions, immigrants and other so-called subversives. Coincidentally, Leo agrees to hold onto a box for a friend — a box that contains incendiary devices and a stack of radical literature.

The inevitable conflagration and its long anticlimax are set up so obviously and predictably that one can only assume Barrett wanted it this way. The acclaimed writer of seven previous books of fiction, including the story collection Ship Fever, winner of the National Book Award, Barrett can write beautifully when she cares to. At the sanitarium, “time clotted like blood in a bowl,” while the rooms smell “of scalded milk, warm chocolate, the felt in our slippers and the disinfectant used on the floors.” At dusk, the patients watch “the headlamps of the night attendants, shining in the distance and then, as they reached the big curve in our road, winking out of sight.”

Yet Barrett seems less interested in her story and characters than in her novel’s metaphors and the science that generates them. Eudora and Leo are first drawn to each other by their interest in the sanitarium’s radiography equipment. When Eudora looks at Leo’s chest X-ray, “he’d seemed truly transparent.” Well, yes, exactly. Leo’s driving interest is organic chemistry, which teaches him that “matter does not disappear and is not created, but only undergoes various physical and chemical transformations.” Miles is further embittered when a ship full of the fossils he and his young friend had dug out of the hills of Alberta is torpedoed by a U-boat, no doubt foiling England’s urgent wartime need for saurischia bones.

At every turn, Barrett feeds us historical and scientific information as strictly as her TB patients are made to eat regular meals. She forces on us a large chunk of the Zimmerman telegram and not one but two extended passages from the introduction to an actual chemistry textbook. She resorts to that hoariest of devices for providing historical background, repeatedly having her characters chew over the newspaper headlines. (“It hadn’t been even a year, David reminded us, since Pershing took American troops into Mexico in pursuit of the revolutionary general Pancho Villa.”) Then there is the device of the discussion group itself, which enables the amazingly erudite sanitarium inmates to lecture us on any number of subjects, including local experiments in communal living, socialism, poison gas, the science of cinematography and that creaky literary war horse, Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Barrrett’s characters add still more to this avalanche of tangential information through their words and thoughts. “I was 6 when the Roentgen rays were discovered,” Leo explains at one point, and the woman who runs the radiography lab responds, “X-ray spectroscopy is really astonishing, isn’t it?” Elsewhere, Eudora reminisces about her high school chemistry class: “I remember benzene, though—six carbon atoms?”

There is a lot of this. And when Barrett’s characters aren’t lecturing us on science, they speak in sentences heavy with sudden self-knowledge and an unlikely poeticism. “If I found a flower that had fallen from one of the tulip trees, that was enough to make the whole day. A pine cone. The sight of the neighbor’s gray horse,” Naomi laments. A nurse’s aide remarks that Leo “needed not so much company as a companion.” But these are the observations of a novelist, not a nurse’s aide or a teenage girl, and increasingly they make Barrett’s characters seem like arbitrary beings, maneuvered about the novel according to her whim. Would Naomi, a rather cruel young woman who desperately wants to escape from Tamarack Lake, really fall for a penniless TB patient rather than, say, Eudora’s brother, who has a good job in New York and invites her to visit him there? Would Leo, depicted as constantly kind and thoughtful, really keep a box containing dangerous incendiary devices in an unsecured locker in a hospital full of invalids? Would that hospital really become a prime target for a witch hunt?

Tuberculosis itself, of course, is a well-worn literary metaphor, and here Barrett uses it to form all the other patients at the sanitarium into a Greek chorus. Yet this collective voice fails to betray the urgent fear of death that would surely pervade their consciousness. Instead, the patients are employed as a stand-in for society at large, then and maybe now. Helpless, cowed, self- interested, they are predictably intimidated by Miles’s league of zealots until they “turned like jackals on those who tried to hold themselves apart or guard their privacy.”

I sympathize with Barrett’s feeling of repugnance for the all-too-forgotten American Protective League and, if I read her correctly, her intent to connect its activities with the despicable exploitation of 9/11 by the Bush administration in order to undermine our civil liberties. But these sentiments are advanced in a pat and bloodless manner. We know at all times who the good people are, and the bad. We are left with a worldview that feels every bit as snug and impermeable as the physical world of Barrett’s TB patients, cosseted in their “cure chairs,” whispering solely to one another.