The Air We Breathe

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

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

On first glance, this novel could be the American Magic Mountain: it's set in a TB sanatorium in the Adirondacks ("Tamarack Lake," a fictionalized Saranac Lake) during the leadup to the Great War. But Barrett's themes and preoccupations are quite different than Mann's. The Air We Breathe is about collective responsibility, or, more specifically, the failures of collective responsibility.

Leo Marburg, trained as a chemist back in Odessa, has been working menial jobs when he's diagnosed with consumption and sent up from the city to Tamarack Lake. He joins a group of mostly immigrants at the public sanatorium. A wealthy industrialist, taking the cure in a private cottage, sets up a discussion group at thesanatorium to help enlighten the show more patients, driven there by the disaffected daughter of the owner of the private cottage. The group grows and the patients and staff become entwined with each others' lives, leading to a tragedy paralleling the concurrently spiralling tragedy of the War.

The Air We Breathe gives a good sense of the boringness and sense of being out of time of the invalid experience, and the feel of the late 19thC sanatorium building. The way the disease feels, the worry about the new hollow spots in the lungs, these things were harder to approach. The novel does a good job of depicting the collective experience of medical institutionalization, but not of individual experiences of illness.

The novel is told in first person plural, "we," the voice of all the patients (except Leo and a few others), in a choice explained only as the very end of the novel. By taking voice together, the narrators can, if not expiate, explain their guilt. The discussion in the weekly group of collective societies and utopian communities highlights the characters' preoccupation with how people can or can not take care of each other: one patient finds Oneida, New Harmony, etc, interesting not for the failures of these communities, but for the deathless idealistic impulse to try again. The patients discover all the small and large places where they failed.

I understand the motivations behind the narrative "we," but I found it distancing, getting in the way of my engagement with the characters. The endless foreshadowing gave the novel a sense of inevitability, which is exactly what I think one should avoid in doing history work, and particularly in historical fiction where everyone knows what's going to happen (the US will join the war! there will be anti-immigrant hysteria!). Additionally, not having read any of Barrett's other books, the family tree at the end gave away a plot point for me.

Overall, an interesting meditation on blame and the collective. 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

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.

http://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2012/06/air-we-breathe-by-andrea-barrett.html show less

I've been a fan of Andrea Barrett's work for a while: I enjoy how she brings her knowledge of science and natural history into her novels, and this is no exception. The Air We Breathe is set in a small Adirondack town, centered around a state sanatorium and a private rest home for tuberculosis patients, and Barrett lingers over treatment practices, early radiography, and chemistry. The story is well told, and I quite liked how Barrett handled the narration, which is rather unconventional (no spoilers here - go read the book).

As I was reading I kept thinking that I recognized some of the names, or characters - and sure enough, in a note at the end, Barrett clarifies that people related to characters from her earlier stories did make show more appearances. Another element of Barrett's work(s) that I really like (and which may well prompt me to go back and some of her earlier stories again). show less

Tamarack Lake, in upper state New York is a sanatorium tucked into the Adirondack Mountains. It is the fall of 1916, on the cusp of America entering the war. Wealthy tubercular patients live here, stuck in a monotonous routine. Gossip and rumors abound. This is a highly ambitious and smart novel, touching on science, anti-immigrant prejudice and mulitple romantic interludes. My issues were in the uneven narrative flow and convoluted storylines, along with keeping up with the myriad of characters. I prefer her short fiction but I still think it is worth reading, especially for Barrett fans.