Review by New York Times Review
"YOU HAVE TURNED your back on the common man, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and their intelligence," H. G. Wells wrote in a 1928 letter to James Joyce, after reading sections of "Finnegans Wake." "Do I get much pleasure from this work? No. Do I feel I am getting something new and illuminating as I do when I read ... Pavlov's badly written book on Conditioned Reflexes? No." In other words, science involves new illuminations, messiness, even creative destruction, but literature is something else entirely: the common reader needs clarity, simplicity and a hopeful outlook, a sense that, in Wells's words, progress is "not inevitable but interesting and possible." Andrea Barrett's "Archangel," a collection of five long stories clustered around the turn of the 20th century, each set at a moment of decisive scientific change, is a book Wells might very easily have admired. Barrett's characters are young American scientists, Emersonian optimists, all on the right side of history - defending Darwin against Louis Agassiz, witnessing the earliest attempts at airplane flight, choosing Einsteinian relativity over defenses of the ether, employing X-rays on a remote battlefield during the Russian civil war following World War I, making tentative strides toward the discovery of DNA. Two of the stories, "The Ether of Space" and "The Island," concern young women struggling to make careers in science against nearly impossible odds. In one of the book's most beautiful passages, two women in Agassiz's experimental school struggle to enter a sea cave in Victorian dress: "The folds of her skirt, which dragged on the shells and tore at the algae, kept blocking her way.... From the shore they must look like a pair of handbells, stems slipped into the cave." But even here, in a place where we might expect the narrative to detour into darkness - perhaps alluding to Agassiz's enormous influence on 19th-century scientific racism - the story ends with one of the women mourning his untimely death, remembering his enthusiasm and humor: "A little black cricket... had leapt into the air that first day at the island, as if presenting itself for the professor's inspection and delight." This is the essence of Barrett's method: where we expect a moment of high drama or a forceful resolution, we get a tiny, resonant detail, a shade of melancholy, a small satisfaction. "I don't believe in the existence of a spirit world," one young character writes in "The Ether of Space," dismissing occultism in favor of Einstein. "What I do know is that the questions we ask about the world and the experiments we design ... are connected to our feelings." Does it matter, among these stories, that Einstein's theories helped invent nuclear weapons, that natural selection was employed as a defense against progressive social reform, that only a decade passed between the first successful flights and World War I? It's difficult to say, because the scope of these stories is so small: there are the experiments themselves, which Barrett describes in rich and nuanced detail, and, likewise, the feelings of the characters. But the characters themselves are bit players, whose insights seem almost intentionally modest and limited. In reading "Archangel," I kept waiting for the presence of some erratic visionary - for a voice like J. Robert Oppenheimer's, intoning as he watched the first test of the atomic bomb, "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds" - to give these discoveries, these new thoughts, their proper weight and breadth. Which is another way of saying that what Wells failed to see in "Finnegans Wake" was a response to the disorder and disruption of 20th-century science - a book that tried to be as explosive and open-ended as Einsteinian relativity or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. In arguing for clarity, simplicity and hope, Wells undervalued his readers but also failed to see how radically and irreversibly science was changing the culture of his own time. Andrea Barrett is a consummate literary artist, but in "Archangel" she's trying to superimpose order and decorum on an era that tolerated neither. It's pointless to repeat modernism's experiments - what's the point, in science or art, of reinventing the wheel? - but it's just as disingenuous to write as if Joyce, or any of the other great visionaries and oracles of 20th-century literature, never existed. JESS ROWS novel, "Your Face in Mine," will be published in the summer of 2014.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 29, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* National Book Award winner Barrett (The Air We Breathe, 2007) returns to the short story in her first collection since Servants of the Map (2002), drawing on her fascination with science, the wellspring for her discerning, imaginative, and tender fiction. In the dazzling opening story, young Constantine is liberated from his troubled Detroit home to spend the summer of 1908 helping his dynamic uncle with his experimental farm in a New York State village of exuberant investigators busy building and flying an airplane that wins a Scientific American trophy. In the book's staggering finale, Constantine reappears as a wounded soldier in 1919 stationed in the remote Russian town of Archangel. In between, Barrett incisively portrays women intent on breaking into the male-dominated scientific realm, including intrepid teacher Henrietta Atkins, two science writers, and one of the first X-ray technicians. Reveling in technical innovations and tectonic shifts in ideas and perceptions, Barrett dramatizes the impassioned conflicts engendered by the discoveries of Mendel, Darwin, and Einstein along with the toxic politics of science while celebrating the sharing of knowledge. Most movingly, she considers the subtle ways that, as one character expresses it, science was influenced by feeling. Barrett's consummate historical stories of family, ambition, science, and war are intellectually stimulating, lushly emotional, and altogether pleasurable.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Barrett, whose novel Ship Fever won the 1996 National Book Award, dwells on the intersections between science (her interests include genetics, astronomy, and zoology) and ethics (love, purpose, solace). Her training in biology and her meticulous research allow Barrett to speak of facts with authority, but in this powerful collection of five long stories, the facts come through the eyes of lost, lonely, elusive "investigators." In "The Ether of Space," set in 1920, astronomer Phoebe Wells struggles with the implications of Einstein's theories; in "The Island," set in 1873, young biologist Henrietta Atkins, initially worshipful of a creationist professor, succumbs to Darwinism. As is typical of Barrett's work, characters overlap. A 12-year-old boy catching his first sight of "aeroplanes" in "The Investigators," set in 1908, is encountered again as a WWI soldier in the excellent title story, where he sees planes bombing his camp. At times, Barrett's exercises in defamiliarization falter, leaving us with a barrage of historic-scientific details; at others, her ruminative observers remain too elusive to be believed, with "loneliness" and "enigma" crossing into tropes. But these few missteps don't counter the overall power of the book; there is indeed a sense of expansion as one travels onward in Barrett's world, and pleasure in watching it fill out. Agent: Emily Forland, Brandt & Hochman. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Barrett, winner of the National Book Award for her story collection Ship Fever, has a remarkable ability to capture the essence of the natural world, as if describing a perfect snowflake. Her newest offering of interconnected stories pulls together (by happenstance) earnest, intelligent, and fallible characters, and their interactions are life-altering. "The Investigators" tells the story of a young man living in 1908 who discovers a new world of scientific inquiry. Set in 1873, "The Island" introduces a young woman attending a seminar at a primitive camp off of Cape Cod, MA, who slowly comes to understand the shattering implications of Darwin's theories. In the final tale, "Archangel," the year is 1919, and American medics yearn for home but are stranded in northern Russia at the end of the Great War. As scientific discoveries progress, human emotions move round and round. VERDICT Readers familiar with Barrett's work will embrace this new volume; those who have yet to discover her intriguing style will find much to consider. A delight for informed readers of challenging literary fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 2/4/13.]-Susanne Wells, Indianapolis (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The award-winning author returns with another collection of stories distinguished by uncommon scope and depth. Having won the National Book Award with Ship Fever (1996), Barrett has continued to command fictional territory all her own. Her latest collection of five stories finds her fiction typically steeped in science, rich in ideas, set in the historical past, and filled with characters who share the excitement, and some of the fear, of discovery. Framing the collection are two stories featuring the same protagonist, Constantine Boyd, as a boy of 12 from Detroit in "The Investigators," set in 1908, and as a soldier amid the madness of war in the concluding title story, set in 1919 Russia. The first story is a masterwork of misdirection, as the boy investigates a world rife with discovery--of evolution, flight, family, identity, self (away from home, he flirts with calling himself "Stan")--while the reader discovers the underlying story of the protagonist's home life, the reasons why the boy spends summers with one uncle or another. Other stories delve deeply into the debates initially surrounding evolution, the popular but subsequently discarded notion of ether, and the darker implications of genetics (with the rise of Nazi Germany as a backdrop). Yet the characters are never secondary to (or mere mouthpieces for) the provocative ideas, as the stories explore relationships among mentors and students, scientific rivals, romantic attractions. She writes not only of someone "who still appreciates the poet's wonderment in these days at the marvels of science," but as someone who can recapture that wonderment decades after such marvels have been embraced or refuted. And she recognizes throughout the collection "how the theories seized on with such enthusiasm by one generation might be discarded scornfully by the next." Barrett's stories rank with the best.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
