Breathing lessons

NORTH ADAMS - In this confident age of science, the terror of tuberculosis and its hoped-for cure through fresh air and rest seems long ago and far away, even with the recent resurgence of drug-resistant strains. However, Andrea Barrett's new novel, "The Air We Breathe," set in an Adirondack sanatorium during World War I, connects with that world. As historical fiction sometimes does, the novel, with its subtext of suspicion and paranoia in wartime, also connects with the present.

With eight books of fiction, Barrett has spent many years in the past, especially the 19th century, creating characters in close encounters with science or the natural world. Based on extensive research, her stories are full of accurate detail. The great biologists Carl Linnaeus and Gregor Mendel figure in two of the stories of "Ship Fever," winner of the 1996 National Book Award. "The Voyage of the Narwhal" (1998), set in 1855, relates an epic search for the fate of the long-lost Franklin arctic expedition. In it, naturalist Erasmus Darwin Wells encounters the life and drama of the frozen north. In the title story of "Servants of the Map" (2002), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, British surveyor Max Vigne finds beauty and painful self-discovery in the Himalayas in the 1860s.

It is not surprising, given her subjects, that Barrett, 52, started out as a biology major. What is surprising is that while she loved to read fiction from an early age, she never gave a thought to writing it until she was in graduate school.

"I really didn't know that a person could be a fiction writer," she said in an interview at her home in a hulking former weaving mill in the shadow of Hoosac Mountain. "I read constantly novels, without any sense that living people made those things. It was something that seemed to fall to the earth, like rain or starshine."

Growing up on Cape Cod, she loved the ocean and its life, but hated school and studied little. "I probably skipped half my junior year of high school," she said. "I would go to Craigville Beach in the winter, when there was no one there, and bring Tolstoy or something." She found an unusual escape, applying to college early, hoping to skip the rest of high school. To her surprise, she was accepted by Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. Though she says she tested well, "my grades were terrible - I don't know why they took me. I still don't have a high school diploma." At Union, she met fellow student Barry Goldstein (she was 16; he was 19), and they eventually married. He is a photographer and a professor of medical humanities at the University of Rochester.

Though she earned a degree in biology, her imagined career in science was not to be. In 1974 she went to graduate school in biology at UMass-Amherst but dropped out in her first semester. "It took me 20 years to realize that I was interested in stories about science and about people who did science, and had confused that with actually doing science," she said. "As it turns out, I had no scientific gift at all."

Indicating the breadth of her interests, she returned to UMass in 1976 to study medieval history. While she was working on a paper about a conflict within the Franciscan order, fiction seemed to tap her on the shoulder. "I ended up writing a little play, breaking into lines of dialogue," she said, "with people asking each other things. I looked at that and thought, 'You know, I don't think this is actually how people do history."' During this second scholarly stint, also abandoned, she began work on a novel.

In 1978, Goldstein was in medical school at the University of Rochester, and Barrett joined him there. "I worked as a secretary in the medical school," she said, "writing grants, and when there wasn't any work I would try to write a novel on the same typewriter, and if someone came in I'd rip out the page and put the grant back in." Years passed as she wrote and rewrote, started and abandoned books. Her first short story was published in 1985, and her first novel, "Lucid Stars," in 1988. Books appeared steadily after that, and she began to teach writing at various colleges. In 2004, she and Goldstein moved to North Adams when she accepted an appointment at Williams College.

Barrett's writing has a quality of reflective mildness, a restraint, which some might call quiet. "I would argue with that word 'quiet,' " said Cambridge-based novelist Margot Livesey, a close friend. "There is an elegance of tone, but an enormous amount happens. 'The Air We Breathe' is turbulent and dramatic, full of longing and death and lust, the yearning to discover one's own life and way in the world."

That much of her fiction is set in Victorian times relates partly to Barrett's temperament, says Livesey: "It was the last great age of the scientific amateur who could be interested in science, read poetry at night, and also love art. That is part of her own nature." Barrett said: "I'm not fast nor clever in any part of my life. I'm interested in the world around me but also cannot seem to understand or respond to it quickly. I think slowly, read slowly. I revise endlessly. The idea of not having TV, radio, the Internet, all those things pounding at you all at once, is for me very pleasant, and the 19th century comes equipped like that."

It's clear that her writing does engage with modern life, even if indirectly and through an antique lens. She and Goldstein were living in New York in September 2001, while she held a writing fellowship at the New York Public Library and worked on "The Air We Breathe." "Until that year," she said, "I thought I was writing a version of [Thomas Mann's] 'The Magic Mountain' " - a novel about tuberculosis. "I wanted to explore what it was like to be in a sanatorium."

But the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 took the book in a new direction. "I got interested in the atmosphere of forced patriotism and suspicion," she said, "and the anti-immigrant hysteria that rose up. I began to read about that period in World War I when the same things were happening, and it all seemed overlapping to me. In the same way that an epidemic moves through a group of people, whether it's TB or AIDS, a kind of epidemic of suspicion and paranoia can spread geometrically to one, two, four, eight people."

For Barrett, the National Book Award was a psychological, as well as a commercial, turning point. In prior years, she said, "I was beyond shy. My first four books sold 1,600 to 1,800 copies. I didn't give readings, because I would get so nervous that I would throw up. You couldn't have found a more awkward young woman, and I wasn't that young - I was 41 and felt 21. Suddenly this crazy thing happened. It was wonderful, but it did rattle me." In time, the pressure faded. "After a year of 'Oh, what am I going to do now?', I just got back to work."

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.