The Air We Breathe

Andrea Barrett is a master at blending science and history within compelling works of fiction. "The Air We Breathe" is set in the Adirondacks in the fall of 1916, a time when tuberculosis is devastating urban populations and the entry of America into World War I is looming. The story takes place in the fictional town of Tamarack Lake, where poor tubercular patients live in a large public sanatorium and wealthy patients in private “cure cottages.”

The treatment provided to the Tamarack State Sanatorium patients consists of a strictly enforced regimen of bed-rest, fresh air and good nutrition, intended to support the body’s ability to develop a resistance to the tubercular bacillus. Patients are separated by gender and fight boredom show more with rumors and gossip. Into this environment enter two patients from highly dissimilar backgrounds: Leo Marburg, a poor Polish-German-Russian immigrant with a background in chemistry and Miles Fairchild, a wealthy cement plant owner and paleontology enthusiast, who establishes a weekly educational discussion group for patients. The relationships that they develop through these sessions with two young women who are close friends - Naomi Martin, a young cottage worker, and a ward maid, Eudora MacEachern – lead to tragedy for the sanatorium, fueling the divisions and xenophobic, anti-immigrant prejudices that accompanied the war.

Represented by the pronoun “we,” the 60 women and 60 men who are residents of the Tamarack public sanatorium serve as a collective narrator, not always in agreement, but in closing acknowledging a collective blame for events. Through this “all-seeing” narrator, we are introduced to the atmosphere of the sanatorium and its daily routines, as well as the lives of local citizens who manage the cure cottages. I found this technique to be an effective vehicle for tying together the thoughts and motivations of the various main characters, adding to an understanding of the nature of communications and relationships within the confinement of such communities. In an appendix to this work, Barrett provides an additional vehicle illustrating the evolving historical and human inter-connections she addresses, through a multi-generational family tree of characters that have appeared in others of her short stories and novels.

While the story-line is a work of fiction, the background, setting and themes of this novel are largely factual. The novel’s setting strongly resembles the Adirondack village of Saranac Lake, where the first U.S. laboratory for tuberculosis research was established, as well as an early network of sanatoria “cure cottages.” The manifestations of Nationalism exhibited in the novel by both local citizens and sanatorium patients, despite many themselves being poor immigrants, parallel the attitudes of citizen “surveillance” groups formed throughout the country as American involvement in the war intensified. Other events drawn from the history and science of this period include the advances and dangers of the developing x-ray technology and of chemical weapons, and the emergence of women as significant participants in scientific circles.

Andrea Barrett has become a favorite author of mine and I highly recommend this novel, which has inspired in me an interest in comparing it with two other works of fiction set in sanatoria: "The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann and "The Empusium" by Olga Tokarczuk. show less

Tuberculosis patients are transported to an Adirondack sanatorium for their rest-cure in the days just before World War I, and in Andrea Barrett’s excellent The Air We Breathe provides a microcosm for the world on the eve of losing its innocence in the “War to End All Wars.” There are many novels which show an author’s deep understanding of human nature, and "The Air We Breathe" belongs in the ranks of the very finest.

Leo Marburg, a young Russian immigrant without family or cultural ties, contracts the dread consumption while living and working in Brooklyn in the spring of 1917. His arrival at Tamarack State, the institution for tuberculosis patients, precipitates at length a series of misunderstandings, and attracts the show more suspicion of the self-appointed authorities. His fellow inmates also succumb to unfounded suspicion, and turn on him. At novel’s end, they realize how unfair they were to their former friend, and how unjust.

Ms. Barrett does a marvelous job of bringing in the remarkable historical events at that epochal moment. The inmates, suffering from boredom and a sense of abandonment, begin, grudgingly at first, to gather once a week to hear a talk by one of their own. Late in the book, after all the reproach and recrimination have played their havoc on the principals, particularly Leo, the group reflects on a time of lost innocence (a grand job of the author to catch the tenor and momentousness of the time):

“How innocent we seem to ourselves, now, when we look back at our first Wednesday afternoons! Gathering to learn about fossils, poison gas, the communal settlement at Ovid, about Stravinsky and Chekhov, trade unions and moving pictures and the relative nature of time, when we could have learned what we needed about the world and war simply by observing our own actions and desires. We lived as if nothing was important.”

In awe of events swirling beyond their walls, the inmates make the mistake of missing the feelings and personal strife right within their midst. They have witnessed thwarted love, betrayal, xenophobia, wartime jingoism, and the disillusionment of talented immigrants. The clever author accomplishes two tricks at once here: she uses the folly and selfishness of the patients to illuminate the faults of the outside world (there is a fire that generates poison gas and fatally injures three), and also shows in stark relief the truth that the less we care for our fellow beings, the less we are worth. She offers here a lesson for the world at large, and also for much smaller communities. This is superbly thought-provoking, plainly told, and deceptively straightforward. Find the depth through the archetypes. Recommended, big-time.

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I am familiar with the villages of the Adirondacks where this novel is set. In Tupper Lake, there is an institution now called Sunmount Developmental Center that was the site in the late 19th & early 20th centuries of a tuberculosis sanitarium. I have visited Sunmount many times it my professional capacity (it now houses persons with developmental disabilities). Perhaps this is the state institution that Barrett uses as the Tamarack sanitarium. Nearby Saranac Lake is well-known for its history of cottages and homes that housed persons recouperating from TB.

This well-conceived and well-written novel weaves together many interesting themes. Tamarack is populated by persons of lower social classes; many are immigrants. In the private show more sanitaria nearby persons of means reside. They come together when a rich resident decides to sponsor lectures at the Tamarack institution. This allows the residents there to reveal their interesting histories and life stories. The narration in the novel intriguingly shifts between the second person plural to the third person. The "we" in the narration is never identified, but it serves to identify the community that forms the institution.

As in other works by Barrett there's an element of science, particularly about the treatment before antibiotics and about the early radiological technology that was at the institution. There is adept use of metaphor relating to this.

The book takes place at the onset of World War I and into America's entry into the war. The suspicion and hostility towards immigrants that was hugely manifest in America during the war gets deep attention here.

This is a thoughtful,multi-layered and intelligent book that is well worth attention. show less

Isolated and insulated from the world in their cocoons, the TB patients at a state sanitarium tell their story. It is a small and shameful story of xenophobia and misunderstanding among those who by their ostracism from the world and their families should have done better; should have been less placidly herded into their hissing gossipy little groups instead of standing up bravely for a companion.
It is the eve of WWII, the Great War, and American cities rest on an underpinning of immigrant laborers to do the hard and dirty work. Most of these immigrants are from central Europe, Russia and other Slavic regions and from Italy; they are short and swarthy and they do not resemble the Anglo-Saxon or Germanic stock that inhabits the New York show more town and as such are viewed with suspicion. Later even the Germans, despite their love of the German gifts to culture, such as the three B's or the university system as we know it, are thrust into outsider status by the war. Everyone is an outsider, except for a select few who by birthright are True Americans, and even those with impeccable credentials are on shaky ground should they adopt the wrong attitude. This isolation fuels misunderstanding and cruelty and later pain and death.
The lack of connection hides the rich history behind these patients who live such a regimented life as to stifle any individuality. That this common laborer in a sugar factory should have been an aspiring chemist who read with more than journeyman’s delight the texts that uncover the mysteries of the atomic bond never occurs to anyone except one of the great and wonderful characters in this book, a nearly self taught and horribly disfigured radiologist. Even when we are given a glimpse of the life behind the diseased body of one of the TB patients, it is so glancing and distorted as to not really sink in. A patient has a daughter he cares so much for that he runs away from the sanitarium to see her when she is ill, and yet we know nothing of her, nor of him after he leaves the magic circle, although we know that this was an act that was at best illegal and more likely mortally dangerous.
The silence is broken by a tubercular patient who is in a very different position from the warehoused ones in state custody. He is a man of privilege, also with a past he remembers fondly, but with a present that is so comfortable that he swims in self righteousness, with all the ugly attendant follies of self-righteousness, fussiness, arrogance, selfishness, myopia, insensitivity and lack of imagination, to name a few. He brings the whole world to a head by stirring up this quiet pool of people with a weekly round circle to improve their minds. It gets out of hand, the human mind being a damnable thing once loosed and there is love and longing as a result, and people get hurt, people die even. He and his ilk, in high dudgeon, indulge themselves in the worst sort of xenophobic jingoism in the war effort and to what end? He is wrong about so many things from the prospect of a young girl loving him to the threat of the local choir director to the war movement to the need to remove reading material so that there will not be sedition among the dying.
There is hope here in this gloomy and cold climate. There is a doctor that stands up to the threats and the girl who finds that she is more than she knew. There is a discovery of ability and delight among the patients. This is, though, a completely dead end place, an isolated dead zone. The main characters, the two nearly lovers, who we admire and care about, can only save themselves by escape to another, safer place than these toxic places where people came to recover, except so many died, another hidden story.
Barrett writes so well about human issues and science. I have enjoyed everything of hers that I have read. She does not use an extra word. Things are what they are and then more which is better than too much on the surface. Emotions run high and yet people deal with the life they are given. There is nothing to shock or surprise and yet the story is rich and the telling of it and the setting have a vitality and an immediacy that makes this a wonderful read. show less

Andrea Barrett lovingly explores the poetic relationship between science and the desires of the human heart. Many of her characters find themselves pondering their lives in places separating them from the rest of society – a ship frozen in the Arctic, an expedition in an exotic place – and in this novel the characters are quarantined in a tuberculosis sanitarium in upstate New York on the eve of the First World War. The story revolves around one patient, Leo Marburg, a recent immigrant, who while at first chaffing under the restrictions imposed by the rules of the institution (like the rigidly enforced rule to relax), finds friendship and love through a weekly discussion group. He also finds a purpose when one of the doctors lends show more him chemistry books to study so that he may help her with the radiographs she uses to chart patients’ progress, setting into motion events that ultimately trigger a tragedy.

Barrett paints a quiet picture of very human characters with all their charms and flaws thrown together by outside forces, coming together, and pulling apart. Readers of some of her previous books (Ship Fever, The Voyage of the Narwhal, Servants of the Map) will recognize familiar names. One of the delights of reading Barrett is how she weaves characters, and even objects, from one story and one time period to another, creating a world of relationships and history. But not having read any of her other works does not at all detract from the enjoyment of this book. In one slim volume, this novel takes on issues of war, friendship, love, betrayal, time, philosophy, gender, class, and guilt, all written in beautifully clear, lyrical prose. Highly recommended. show less

For me, to open a book by Andrea Barrett is a treat—well-crafted, intelligent writing; interesting, complex characters; an intimate story. Added to that, for me, at least some of her characters have an interest in the natural sciences. In “The Air We Breathe” we’re taken to a publicly funded sanitorium for poor, mostly recent immigrants, tuberculosis patients on the eve of the United States entering WWI. A wealthy man, Miles, from one of the neighboring private cure cottages decides he will embark on elevating the lives of these poor (and presumably uneducated) residents by initiating a weekly lecture group. With time, the members of the group are enlivened by these discussions, Miles becomes infatuated with a young caretaker, show more and she becomes infatuated with a young immigrant, Leo, at the state sanitorium. With the U.S. entry into the war, Miles takes an active role in the local American Protective League and Leo becomes the focus of his suspicions of un-American activities, in effect bringing the casualties of war to the sanitorium. The narrator of the story is not disclosed until the ending, and this disclosure, in itself, amplifies the story and reveals Barrett’s craftsmanship. show less

Reading this book is like living history. And I don't mean boring textbooks. History came alive in this book. Scientific discoveries and WWI are so intertwined in the characters' lives that I got a sense of the times without dreary facts --Well, some of the excerpts from a chemistry text I just skimmed over--and you don't see the big picture, such as the reason for our delayed entry in the war. You just see how all this affected individual lives. On a superficial level, this is a story of what happened to an adult male immigrant who developed TB & was assigned to a sanatorium for the poor. There is a developing love interest, but mostly we get a sense of class differences in treatment options.
This could be called a book of the show more proletariat: we see how working class people have a craving for learning, have a history of teaching circles, feel a responsibility to each other. In fact, her comment about circles is one of the things I love about this book: "Everything here existed in lines...isn't it natural we'd forget what it was like to gather as equals and teach ourselves? For weeks we'd been like students peering up at a teacher, but now we entered as a group into the experience of one of us. For the first time we felt ourselves both inside and outside, here and there." (p.78) The book is written in the first person plural, and fortunately we learn who the antiphonal "we" is in the final chapter.
She makes connections that were new to me. For example, as her characters hear about Einstein's new Theory of Relativity, (which we all think we know now, because we've heard the term, but we really never consider what it means) they think "Time...is not something out there, something beyond us that flows serenely like a river, without any reference to us or our doings...All of us grew up thinking that if everything around us disappeared, our world and even the stars in the sky, time and space would still continue on. Einstein says that time and space would disappear together with the things." (p.180)
Other reviewers have had difficulty understanding the narrator "we". This antiphonal narration is not done by a single person, & is nicely explained in the final chapter. Please also consider the author's choice of epigraphs, particularly the 1915 quote from that time period. Then see how Barrett turns those pompous words on their head. The poor, recent immigrants who reside at the sanatorium are anything but "mentally and moraally poor", tho the same cannot be said for Miles Fairchild, a rich business man residing in a private care home for his TB cure.
The era of the 1910's is brought to life through the characters. And while we don't hear the fate of those left behind in the fire-damaged sanatorium, a study of the Genealogical chart in the end pages gives a hint to the future lives of the characters.
I look forward to further books by this author who gives more than fluff, who knows how to creatively add science to her fiction. show less