Ship Fever: Stories

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In 1764, two Englishwomen set out to prove that swallows--contrary to the great Linnaeus's belief--do not hibernate underwater. But they must be patient and experiment in secret, such actions being inappropriate for the female of the species. In 1862, a hopeless naturalist heads off for yet another journey, though he can't seem to rid his conscience of the thousands of animals that have already died in his service. In 1971, a pregnant young woman, ill at ease with her socially superior husband and his stepchildren, hears of a Tierra del Fuegan taken hostage by the commander of the Beagle in 1835. This unwilling specimen was, we read, "captured, exiled, re-educated; then returned, abused by his family, finally re-accepted. Was he happy? Or was he saying that as a way to spite his captors? Darwin never knew." Many of the characters who populate Andrea Barrett's National Book Award-winning collection, Ship Fever, feel similarly displaced in the world. They long to prove themselves in both science and love, but are often thwarted by gender, social position, or the prevailing order. In "The Behavior of the Hawkweeds," the wife of a genetics professor has learned that each narrative of discovery is matched by one, if not more, "in which science is not just unappreciated, but bent by loneliness and longing." Barrett's astonishing tales of ambition and isolation convey the meaning and feeling behind the patterns--scientific and emotional--but slip free of easy closure. The two women in "Rare Bird," like the swallows, depart England for more conducive climes, or so the brother of one believes. The reader is left to hope, and imagine. Much has been made of Andrea Barrett's interlacing of history, knowledge, and fact--and rightly so. But equal attention should be paid to the brilliant serenity and exactitude of her style.


From Publishers Weekly
The quantifiable truths of science intersect with the less easily measured precincts of the heart in these eight seductively stylish tales. In the graphic title novella, a self-doubting, idealistic Canadian doctor's faith in science is sorely tested in 1847 when he takes a hospital post at a quarantine station flooded with diseased, dying Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine. The story, which deftly exposes English and Canadian prejudice against the Irish, turns on the doctor's emotions, oscillating between a quarantined Irish woman and a wealthy Canadian lady, his onetime childhood playmate. In "The English Pupil," Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, who brought order to the natural world with his system of nomenclature, battles the disorder of his own aging mind as he suffers from paralysis and memory loss at age 70. In "The Behavior of the Hawkweeds," a precious letter drafted by Austrian monk Gregor Mendel, who discovered the laws of heredity, reverberates throughout the narrator's marriage to her husband, an upstate New York geneticist. Barrett (The Forms of Water) uses science as a prism to illuminate, in often unsettling ways, the effects of ambition, intuition and chance on private and professional lives. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


New York Times Book Review
Her work stands out for its sheer intelligence....The overall effect is quietly dazzling.


The New Yorker
The title novella is devastating: as with every story here, you enter right into it, and cannot leave it entirely behind.


The New York Times Book Review, Thomas Mallon
. . . stands out for its sheer intelligence . . . The overall effect is quietly dazzling. . . .


From Booklist
Barrett, author of The Middle Kingdom (1991), has used science as a conduit to understanding the human psyche in this gorgeously imagined story collection. She mixes historical figures, such as Gregor Mendel and Carolus Linnaeus, with those of her own invention in tales about the quest for insights into the workings of the natural world, including the human heart. The title piece, a gripping novella, takes place during Ireland's Great Famine, when tens of thousands made the cruel transatlantic journey to Canada, only to suffer the horrors of a raging typhus epidemic. A young, disenchanted Canadian doctor agrees to work at a quarantine station in the hope of impressing the woman he loves, but he is in for a rude shock. The understaffed station is in a state of absolute crisis, and emaciated immigrants are dying by the hundreds. In a quieter, more contemporary vein, Barrett combines science and love in "The Littoral Zone," a story about two marine biologists who fall in love, much to the dismay of their respective families. Barrett's stories are precise and concentrated, containing a truly remarkable wealth of psychology and social commentary. Donna Seaman


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"In these wonderfully original stories, the great explorers of mind and geography seem to enter the room, and history feels more immediate than the present....Andrea Barrett does not flinch from large subjects, with her uncanny investigations into human curiousity, her senual and soul-enhancing, and always underlist her splendid intelligence." — Howard Norman


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