The Air We Breathe

I've just now set down The Air We Breathe, Andrea Barrett's science-infused novel about a community of tubercular patients trying to survive their own disease, the paranoia of World War I, and their inevitable disappointments. Barrett is a MacArthur Fellowship winner, a National Book Award winner, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist—accolades that she has absolutely earned for her ability to web together science, plot, and sentences as tranquil as a finger lake in September.

She does it all.

In The Air We Breathe, Barrett does something else as well—tells her story with a chorus of voices, a gentle, overriding we. Back then we lay on our porches in orderly rows.... Fields surrounded us—they still do—and also a river, three ponds, and the road curving down toward the village.

From this vantage point, this cliff above and beyond and after all action, Barrett's story swoops in, hawk like, and settles on the shoulders of protagonists, then swoops off again up back toward that we: When she stepped inside the doorway, we learned from the way she smiled and the swiftness with which Naomi leapt from the ledge and moved to greet her that she was also Naomi's friend.

We saw. We learned. We regret. We should have known. We, unwittingly, contributed to a catastrophe.

It's a rather miraculous performance, far more effective than the second-person strategy of another National Book Award finalist (in a different year), Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End, which, for all its cleverness, even whimsy got stuck, I thought, in its narrative device, could not move beyond the claustrophobia.

Most writers, I suspect, read as much for the suspense of the how a book gets made as for the story itself. As I read The We Are We Breathe, I often felt my heart hammering, wondering, How will she pull her narrative off? Can she take the we all the way to the end and make it work? Andrea Barrett does. It's worth discovering for yourself.