The Princess and the Egg Hunt

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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.

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The Perfect Day

This would be enough for me: A place to sit. Proximity to birds. Unsullied water. Reading weather. I'd carry a picnic of winesap apples, cheddar cheese, artisan bread, an almond chocolate bar (which I would eat in the smallest possible increments over the course of an entire day). People would stop by, every now and then, and tell me their stories. I'd be thinking my own thoughts the rest of the day. The sun would crawl across the sky; the sun would change the day's colors.

At night I'd travel back inside, into a necessarily cozy house. A fire crackling in the fireplace. A blanket tossed across the couch.

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Insomnia: A Poem

At night I keep
watch over my own
heart grinding, hands
winged out like a sylph
to muffle the sound. You
wouldn’t die either,
unaware. You would
stand by affirming blue,
you would remember
the plummeting pink
of the sun that was
caught in the blur
of yesterday’s train,
the shroud of your face, too,
in the scratched glass,
and in the rocking.
Hands over heart,
heart crossing.

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Aloft

I found her in a shop called Imagine in that place known as Skaneateles, and I brought her home because she gave me hope. I've hung her in my office window so that I might watch her float on air.

Do you remember that thirty-four minute French film called "The Red Balloon?" Do you remember how the balloon was the boy's best friend and did not have to speak to take him places? The balloon would show up and the boy would look up and that was the adventure.

We hunt for stories as writers—for complexity, entanglements, surprises. But sometimes it is the simplest story that surprises us the most, that we remember, all these years later.

We catch our breath.

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Creation

In Skaneateles you can walk straight out to the end of the pier and stand above the world's cleanest body of water—stand there and look out and look through the pristine and the unsullied, the hints of emerald within the blue.

Yesterday there was still the bloom of lemon and cranberry leaves along the shore and a sedate crowd of white gulls on a single sun-warmed roof. There was the coming crisp of winter, the gaping grins of autumn's pumpkins. One season invested in the next.

There are days too beautiful to record. There is glint that can't be captured. Beauty like this leaves me gasping for words, struggling to stitch a single line of meaning.

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