Consuming Silence

While anarchists terrify America, these patients in Saranac Lake must endure their own quiet terror.

THE AIR WE BREATHE

By Andrea Barrett

Norton. 297 pp. $24.95

The town of Saranac Lake in the Adirondack Mountains of New York must be one of those haunted places, such as Ellis Island and Alcatraz, where visitors can sense the dread of past inhabitants still trapped in the atmosphere. A popular turn-of-the-century resort, Saranac Lake also was once a prime destination for consumptives who sought to treat the tuberculosis destroying their lungs by immersing themselves in cool mountain air. Andrea Barrett visited some of the "cure cottages" that still stand in Saranac Lake and, clearly, came away possessed. Her latest novel, The Air We Breathe, reads like an elegant ghost story, narrated by a chorus of not-quite-innocent spectral bystanders.

The lost souls who retell the tragic events of Barrett's tale consist of the sick and the poor, most of them immigrants, who were packed off to prison-like sanatoriums in Saranac Lake (called, here, Tamarack Lake) from the pestilential slums of New York City. Forced to lie still, eat heavy meals and, above all, be grateful to their benefactors, these patients have little else to do but gossip about each other and speculate about the new arrivals.

One summer day in 1916, a new, wan face arrives: Leo Marburg is a young man who emigrated from Russia only to find that his scientific training counted for naught in America. Lucky to find work as a laborer in a sugar refinery, Leo stepped outside one night to inspect a bin of raw sugar. "Then he'd coughed -- the same cough he'd had all spring, no more -- and watched, astonished, as blood sprayed over the pale crystals."

Leo's wet cough, witnessed in horror by his fellow workers, seals his fate and immures him in the closed world of the sanitarium. There, his dark good looks and scientific background bring him to the attention of a wide range of "inmates": Irene Piasecka, an x-ray technician who calls to mind a down-on-her-luck Marie Curie; Miles Fairchild, a rich patient whose hobbies are fossil-collecting and uplifting the poor; and two comely village lasses who tend to the patients. Leo, though, can be a bit too obliging to his admirers for his own good. When his roommate, a man with anarchist connections, asks him to hide a mysterious package among his few possessions, Leo agrees; all too inevitably, the enclosed world of Tamarack Lake is blown wide open.

Some of the main players in The Air We Breathe are descendants of the characters Barrett introduced in her 1996 novel Ship Fever, which won the National Book Award. (A check of the imaginary family trees included at the back of The Air We Breathe offers readers tantalizing hints about the extended destinies of Leo and his friends). Barrett also stretches beyond her familiar scientific and psychological interests by describing the increasingly nativist jitters of the political world outside the sanitarium -- a world where upstanding townsfolk demonstrate their patriotism by joining vigilante groups such as the American Protective League and rechristen their pet dachshunds "Liberty Pups." (Shades of "Freedom Fries"?)

But Barrett's writing is most evocative when she's exploring the small rooms and narrow beds that make up the claustrophobic universe of the sick. Here's a passage where Leo recalls his earlier convalescence on a floating barge that served as a "tuberculosis day camp" in New York City:

"The boat had looked like a hulk being stripped for salvage, but instead, he learned, it salvaged consumptives, who took their daily cure behind heavy nets that screened them from passersby. . . .

"He rose when . . . told . . . to, so that he could drink glasses of milk or eat boiled eggs, sit down at one o'clock to the enormous dinners somehow produced in the boat's tiny kitchen, later drink milk again. In the mornings, well-meaning women brought them stacks of newly sewn shirt collars, still inside out; each collar had to be turned, the collar points poked out with a small smooth dowel and the seams aligned to be pressed. They worked for two hours: earning their keep, said the camp director sternly."

Boredom is in the details. Barrett's severe attention to the smallest routines gives us a sense of what it would have been like to have hung suspended for months and even years in a regime of institutionalized inertia that was once the only cure for tuberculosis. The Air We Breathe is a muted tale of terror -- terror that was relentlessly tamped down under cold air, milk and enforced rest. In the apprehensive silence that prevails throughout Tamarack Lake, a cough that's suddenly returned is as much cause for panic as an anarchist's bomb. ¿

Maureen Corrigan is the book critic for the NPR program "Fresh Air" and author of the memoir "Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading."