The Air We Breathe
Categories: Fiction
Some people don’t like fiction that feels “cool,” where there’s a sense that the author has stepped back a pace from her characters. But it can be fascinating to watch a writer use the formalities of fiction to explore her subject. If you agree, try Andrea Barrett’s elegant new historical, The Air We Breathe.
The novel is set in a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Adirondacks in 1916. The inmates (who speak as a kind of Greek chorus in an unusual experiment in first person plural narration) are eagerly curious about the newest arrival amongst them.
How that new arrival changes their society results in personal tragedy for several. And it serves Barrett as a catalyst to explore the interactions of science and social attitudes—attitudes toward medicine, poverty, immigration, patriotism, and war.
Leo Marburg has been sent to the sanitarium by government health authorities. Partly, of course, for his own sake, as fresh air is the recommended treatment for his illness. But mostly as part of an effort to curb the spread of tuberculosis in the crowded cities of the east coast: the living conditions, hygiene, and morals of the urban immigrant poor are regarded as the breeding ground for the dread disease.
An educated man and professional chemist back in Odessa, Leo has been reduced to working as a laborer in a sugar refinery in New York City. Once he is diagnosed with TB, without family and stripped of job and friends by his illness, he has no choice but to take up his place at the sanitarium.
He adjusts, as the other have, to the severely enforced rest cure, required sessions of fresh air lying bundled on open porches, dictated diet, and circumscribed social interaction. He even enjoys some new friendships and the novelty of Wednesday afternoon lectures initiated by a wealthy patient, Miles Fairchild, who is taking the cure in a private cottage nearby.
But the entanglements of society—romance, gossip, jealousy, and class prejudices—complicate even this strictly simple, enclosed life. The daughter of the house where Miles is staying becomes the object of Miles’ interest; unfortunately, she is interested only in Leo. Disaster follows, tearing the sanitarium's little society apart.
Deliberately paced and beautifully constructed, this coolly formal novel gives readers a fascinating glimpse into early twentieth-century society. Like the story of Typhoid Mary (or from more current headlines, the story of patients with highly drug-resistant TB), it’s a classic tragedy of medicine and morals, society and individuals.
