From Publishers Weekly
Picking up connected characters from her 1996 National Book Award–winning story collection
Ship Fever, the latest from Barrett follows her Pulitzer Prize finalist
Servants of the Map. In the fall of 1916, as the U.S. involvement in WWI looms, the Adirondack town of Tamarack Lake houses a public sanitarium and private cure cottages for TB patients. Gossip about roommate changes, nurse visits, cliques and romantic connections dominate relations among the sick—mostly poor European immigrants—when they're not on their porches taking their rest cure. Intrigue increases with the arrival of Leo Marburg, an attractive former chemist from Odessa who has spent his years in New York slaving away at a sugar refinery, and of Miles Fairchild, a pompous and wealthy cure cottage resident who decides to start a discussion group, despite his inability to understand many of his fellow patients. As in Joshua Ferris's recent
Then We Came to the End, Barrett narrates with a collective we, the voice of the crowd of convalescents. Details of New York tenements and of the sanitarium's regime are vivid and engrossing. The plot, which hinges on the coming of WWI, has a lock-step logic, but its transparency doesn't take away from the timeliness of its theme: how the tragedy, betrayal and heartbreak of war extend far beyond the battlefield.
(Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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In 1916, the eve of the U.S. entry into World War I, a microcosm of world politics forms in upstate New York. Wealthy tuberculosis sufferers cure their lungs on private porches, while poor immigrants endure long stays at Tamarack State Sanatorium. Industrialist Miles Fairchild thinks each can learn from the other. He forms a high-minded discussion group but soon resents his marginalization as the poor patients find their voice as a group. (Indeed, there is a first-person-plural narrative refrain.) As war fever grows, the spirit of inquiry is threatened by another kind of groupthink: xenophobia. After an intricately blueprinted, random-yet-inevitable conflagration, the vigilante American Protective League, of which Miles is a member, targets hard-luck case Leo Marburg as a radical. Barrett's work often focuses on the excitement of scientific discovery, and there is also a strong if labored conflict between the curiosity of the poor immigrants and the willful anti-intellectualism of the power holders. Her storytelling restraint evokes the era, but whether readers surrender to her sedate rhythms will depend on their patience. The group voice is an interesting experiment but robs the narrative of its urgency. Still, fans of her previous works (Servants of the Maps, 2002) are unlikely to be disappointed. Graff, Keir
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