The Science of Her Art

In person, Andrea Barrett does not seem like the kind of woman who has slept in a tent on an Arctic ice sheet in 30-degree weather -- though she did just that in 1997 to research her novel The Voyage of the Narwhal, plunking down the entire sum of a Guggenheim grant to travel for six weeks with her husband, biophysicist and photographer Barry Goldstein, to the northern edge of Canada's Baffin Island in Nunavut.

"It was a weenie trip," Barrett insists. "It was summer. When the ice cracks up in the bay, the Inuit people go to the floe edge to hunt, and sometimes they're kind enough to take along crazy white people from the States. They were extremely careful with us. There was no danger."

Six feet tall and willowy, with long silver hair, Barrett looks younger in real life than in her book-jacket photos and much more fragile than her outdoorsy writing might suggest. Her long white hands sport a manicure and several intricate filigreed silver rings.

The best-selling Massachusetts native you've quite possibly never heard of, Barrett is returning to the state this fall, as a resident for the first time in 26 years, to teach at Williams College. A master blender of science, history, and fiction, she has won a veritable bouquet of top writing prizes -- a Guggenheim, a National Book Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called genius grant), a Pushcart Prize, two O. Henry awards, two appearances in The Best American Short Stories, and a stint on the New York Times bestseller list.

Yet she occupies a space somewhere just under the radar of the mainstream reading public. She isn't young (she's turning 50 this fall, and was 34 when her first novel, Lucid Stars, was published); she doesn't have an MFA from a prestigious fiction program; and her writing is undeniably literary -- her characters copy out longhand passages from Joseph Hooker's Himalayan Journals, debate the writings of Thoreau and Emerson, and pass the time reading aloud passages from Elisha Kent Kane's Arctic Explorations.

For all that, Barrett's books have the scope and swagger to satisfy a much broader audience. Narwhal, Barrett's 1998 novel of Arctic exploration in the 1850s, includes thumping storybook elements worthy of a Hollywood epic -- exotic locales, shipwrecks, mutiny, violent death, craven ambition, love stories unconsummated and otherwise, the wrenching loss of beloved characters, political perfidy, and longhaired artsy types casting smoldering glances.

And, always, there is the exhilaration and heartbreak of science, a constant theme in Barrett's work since Ship Fever, her award-winning 1996 collection of short stories. As she writes in the opening story of that collection, "The Behavior of the Hawkweeds," it's a world "in which science is not just unappreciated, but bent by loneliness and longing."

he is both solicitous and a little shy with visitors. She offers tea, asks with concern after the road conditions between Boston and North Adams, where Goldstein has a new, sleek photography studio that doubles as a weekend crash pad until the couple finds a home near Williams. When she talks about her writing, Barrett speaks so softly that the ends of her sentences are swallowed by the tape recorder.

She finds it "irritating and very freeing" to write fiction that's confined by scientific and historical fact. "Irritating the way a grain of sand is irritating to an oyster," Barrett clarifies. "Something about the way my imagination works, I really seem to need to confine myself. I don't want someone else to confine me -- I don't want someone to say to me, you have to write a story that only works with these facts of Mendel's life -- but I seem to have quite a strong need to build boxes for myself. I sometimes wonder if it's not analogous to a poet working in formal form and holding that constraint. It pushes my imagination to places it otherwise wouldn't go."

Barrett returns frequently in her stories and novels to the unspoken disappointment of science: Research is stolen or lost, specimens painstakingly collected at great personal expense wind up at the bottom of the ocean, changing mores leave a life's worth of work irrelevant. "I think about [loss] a lot. It's a very, very real part of science, but it's not the part that gets passed down," says Barrett. "We know the stories of famous scientists, but we don't hear the stories of people working hard and passionately half a tier down."

Barrett credits her Cape Cod childhood as the spark that ignited her lifelong interest in science and the ocean. The family lived in Framingham and Natick before moving "all over the lower and central Cape -- Pocasset, Monument Beach, Centerville, Osterville," she says. "My father was very restless. . . . He was an avid fisherman, and I spent lots of time with him fishing off the Bourne end of the Cape Cod Canal. That's where I got interested in the ocean, and that's what made me want to be a biologist. I was always really, really interested in marine biology and in Woods Hole and the seashore. And now I write about water all the time."

She studied biology as an undergraduate at Union College in upstate New York; pursued zoology in graduate school awhile before dropping out; and worked for several years in the scientific field before she began writing fiction. "I'm always exploring that material from my girlhood and young adulthood, that very great passion for science," she says. "And my husband is a scientist, as are many of our friends." (Goldstein is associate professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of Rochester.) Barrett published four novels before Ship Fever, but each one received fewer reviews and less attention from the reading public. In 1994, her editor changed publishing houses and didn't take Barrett along. "In essence I felt fired, although I wasn't. She was able to bring some people with her and others not, and I had a terrible track record. My last book with her [Forms of Water] did laughably badly; I think it sold 2,000 copies," Barrett recalls. (The novel has since been reissued by Pocket Books.)

So Barrett had a moment of liberating rebellion. "I said, well, fine, if nobody wants to read my novels I might as well write that which I am most interested in, even if it seems bizarre or unappealing to other people."

The result was Ship Fever, which won the 1996 National Book Award for fiction. Reviewers consistently singled out the collection's title novella for its powerful and heartbreaking depiction of Grosse Isle, the Canadian island where ships carrying famine victims from Ireland were quarantined for typhus in the mid-1840s.

One character, Nora, a young girl who manages to survive the fever, reappears as an old woman nursing patients in the early stages of the tuberculosis outbreak at the turn of the 20th century in "The Cure," the final story in Barrett's 2002 collection, Servants of the Map. Now, Barrett is at work on a novel, tentatively titled The Experiment, that deals in part with how tuberculosis patients were treated in New York City in the second decade of the century.

Is she intentionally chronicling the history of infectious disease in North America, or is she just a germ junkie? Barrett laughs in acknowledgment. "It isn't conscious, but it's clear even to me that I'm really into it. The stories of infectious disease research are simply great stories."

But she grows animated when asked if the social, scientific, and political missteps surrounding typhus and tuberculosis might have modern-day implications. "I can't write about the AIDS epidemic directly, I'm too close to it. And I can't write about [Iraq] now, because I'm too peeved and I don't know enough. It's a combination of too much emotion and not enough distance and not enough information.

"Often the way I confront things is to seize on a situation that to me feels analogous in the past and to explore that very deeply, with that hope that as you read it you will be thinking about the Irish famine or about the way the British mapped the Kashmir, then engineered a later invasion of Afghanistan. If you stand back, you can think about what's going on now from a somewhat complex or richer perspective."

arrett has taught fiction for 10 years at North Carolina's Warren Wilson College; she visits twice a year for intensive 10-day sessions. She is also co-editor of a new anthology, The Story Behind the Story: 26 Writers and How They Work. Published last month, the collection pairs short fiction from established writers (including Barrett), all of whom taught at Warren Wilson, with essays from the authors explaining how they wrote the stories. "We really wanted people to talk about how the stories got built, why they made the narrative choices that they did," says Barrett. "It's very craft-oriented."

Young writers and craft are much on Barrett's mind these days as she prepares to begin teaching undergraduates for the first time ever this fall. But, her experience as a teacher and her 20-plus years of writing notwithstanding, Barrett says the novel-building process never gets any easier.

Case in point: her latest novel. She spent 2000-2001 as a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, researching everything from sugar refineries in Brooklyn (where one main character in The Experiment works) to Bellevue Hospital (where tuberculosis patients were once treated). "It's all a big trail of discovery. I'm really happiest when I learn something new, when I research something new," she says.

But then comes the hard part. Twice now she has written 100 pages, only to discard them. "When I start something new, I am really a beginner again, and on this book in particular, I'm trying to do something I haven't done before," she explains. "I've been at this three years already, and it's just about in the last eight months that I have found what I think is the right narrative voice."

Every word of every draft Barrett writes she passes by Margot Livesey, the Cambridge-based novelist (Eva Moves the Furniture) and fellow teacher (Livesey is a writer in residence at Emerson College), and Barrett reads Livesey's work as well.

What Barrett's searching for in her many revisions, says Livesey, is "constructing a plot that really grows out of the characters rather than being imposed upon them. Andrea has a great gift for choosing interesting material and interesting situations. The major part of her endeavor is finding a deeper level of meaning for her characters."

Barrett is matter-of-fact about the despair and self-doubt she feels when she has to throw out six or eight months' work, but she remains optimistic. "I think I have a very modest natural gift, but I'm quite stubborn. In that argument we all have within ourselves all the time between giving up or just starting over, the good side wins in me eventually."

If there's any message she'll try to deliver to her new, young charges, it's the same lesson her characters learn over and over again, the same one she's still learning herself as a much-lauded mid-career writer: that wrong paths and lost research are part of the process.

"What would I tell my students? Just experiment. You're still young, just go down paths and fail and fail and fail and read and write and read and write and fall on your face happily while you still have the time." She pauses. "Well, that's what I would like to encourage. It will be interesting to see how far I get."

Tracy Mayor's last article for the magazine was about cursive handwriting.