From the Boston Globe Magazine, Feb. 28, 2004.
The Science of Her Art
Massachusetts
native Andrea Barrett's fascination with the scientific world has catapulted
her from little-known author to bestsellerdom.
By Tracy Mayor, 2/29/2004
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.”
She 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.”
Barrett 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.”