Library Director’s NotebookFebruary 2012 I don’t like to think of fiction as “just a story” or...

Thu, 02/02/2012 - 1:11pm -- KChin

Library Director’s Notebook
February 2012

I don’t like to think of fiction as “just a story” or something that “isn’t true.”  The best fiction transcends its own storyline and holds an element of universal truth that has much more impact than “just the facts”.

This is the case with Andrea Barret’s novel  The Air We Breathe.  Set during the later years of World War I, in the Adirondacks, The Air We Breathe is on the surface a fairly simple story about a closed community.  Most of the action takes place at Tamarack State Sanatorium for those recovering from, or in some cases, dying from tuberculosis.  Unlike the private cure homes that cater to the well to do seeking a cure, Tamarack State Sanatorium is a government funded agency for the poor, many of whom are recent Immigrants to the United States.

The story centers around the relationships between Leo Marburg,  an intellectually curious immigrant from Lithuania,  who although well educated in his own country has been unable to find suitable work in America ;  Eudora, a nurse whom he greatly admires; Naomi, a restless young woman from the village who has her eye on Leo; and Miles, a well-to-do factory owner recovering from tuberculosis in a private cure home, who becomes obsessed with Naomi.

Stated in this bald way, a reader might suspect the story will be just another steamy romance.  How far from the truth that is!  Barret in her previous works, including the Voyage of the Narwhal  and  Servants of the Map ,  shows a great gift for seamlessly folding intriguing scientific information into a complex ,human narrative.  Her gifts for balancing scientific curiosity with insight about human struggles make The Air We Breathe another triumph for a writer whose work just gets better and better.

What I find most intriguing about this novel is how topics that are part of the national scene now, including issues of public health and immigration, are shown to have been just as prevalent and divisive in the earlier part of the 20th century.

In 1916, although America had not entered the European War due to strong isolationist feeling,  there was a growing sense of uneasiness about Germans living in the United States.  Fear mongers fed upon the uneasiness of the public, raising suspicions not just about new German immigrants but about German American citizens who had lived in the country for generations. Suspicions about communist infiltrators to the United States, union organizers, and anyone not fitting a certain bland, homogeneous “patriotic” stereotype led neighbors to look askance at each other and gave government and quazi-government groups growing power to investigate, question, and arrest potential “enemies” to the United States.

Fear too, that “ unwashed hoards of immigrants” were the ones bringing epidemics to the country, whether on board ship or because of crowded tenement conditions, led to increasing hostility to those who had come to America with hope in their hearts.  Leo is one such immigrant, forced, because of a bout with tuberculosis to leave his job and his few friends to take up residence in Tamarack Lake Sanatorium, with rules and custodians who often make for very unpleasant living arrangements.

 

When Miles, in a burst of energy, visits the sanatorium and proposes a Wednesday discussion group, the project soon becomes a favorite and very rewarding gathering for the patients.  But Miles’s obsession with Naomi and her equal obsession with Leo set into motion a chain of events that bring havoc and death to the closed community.  More subtly, the residents themselves react in ways that bring them little honor or self respect as they turn against their own in a time of tragedy.

The Air We Breathe is a powerful historical novel with a modern and disturbing resonance.

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