"The Air We Breathe" | Class and xenophobia among the TB-stricken

"The Air We Breathe"

by Andrea Barrett

Norton, 297 pp., $24.95

Wartime paranoia in an ailing, inward-looking community is the focus of the new novel by National Book Award winner Andrea Barrett ("Ship Fever").

It's a subject that should be rich with possibilities. But in "The Air We Breathe" it stays strangely inert.

The year is 1916. The setting is an upstate New York village that's home to a public tuberculosis sanatorium and to pricier, private cottages where the rich can enjoy their luxuries while undergoing the same rest cure for TB as the wards of the state.

The "stars" of this hermetic existence are: Leo Marburg, a TB-stricken young Russian of German-Polish extract (future grandfather to sisters Rose and Bianca, who have appeared in earlier Barrett stories); Miles Fairchild, an American entrepreneur, also with TB, who gets caught up in the anti-German fervor of the era; Naomi Martin, an artistically gifted but troubled teenager whose mother runs the cottage where Miles keeps residence; and Eudora MacEachern, Naomi's best friend, who works in the sanatorium.

Miles loves Naomi. Naomi loves Leo. Leo loves Eudora.

As for kind-hearted Eudora, she admires Leo but is still sorting out her feelings about this messy romantic quadrangle.

Also on hand: the sanatorium staff, including X-ray technician Irene Piasecka, who takes an interest in both Eudora and Leo, and sanatorium director Dr. Petrie, who resists Miles' invitation to join the American Protective League, a civilian group riding roughshod over civil rights in reaction to terrorist threat. (Not an idle fear: Two New Jersey munitions stores were destroyed by German saboteurs in 1916 and 1917.)

Barrett underlines the class differences between the sanatorium residents and cottage dwellers, viewing the action through a collective first-person "we" whose intrusions into the narrative never feel less than awkward.

"We weren't a big group," this anonymous chorus tells the reader, "and a single arrival shifted scores of relationships, as did a single discharge, or a death. On the porches we gossiped as eagerly as we drew breath."

Barrett provides good clinical detail on tuberculosis treatments, early X-ray technology and other scientific advances of the day. She just as clearly draws parallels between Miles' circle's paranoia about the sizable German population in the U.S. and present-day domestic fears of the Muslims in our midst.

The trouble is, it's all a little too clear, starting with Barrett's protagonists. From the get-go, Miles is an overweening blowhard, Naomi is a nasty piece of work (whatever her gifts) and Leo and Eudora are saints ripe for secular canonization.

The latter pair's first meeting of minds is surely more comical than Barrett intends.

"What did you make?" Eudora asks, when she finds him holding "a shiny hexagonal ring the size of a dinner plate" in his hand.

"Model of a benzene molecule," Leo answers. "Did you take chemistry in school?"

"Two years," she says, "Not as much as I would have liked, but that's all girls can take here. I remember benzene, though — six carbon atoms?"

Dialogue like this doesn't serve Barrett's characters well. In the past, she has expertly pinpointed the tension between scientific discipline and the erratic nature of the human heart (see almost any story from her 2002 collection, "Servants of the Map"). But "The Air We Breathe," even at its most melodramatic turns, stays peculiarly dull, predictable and safe.