Review by Booklist Review
Barrett writes exceptionally creative, inquisitive, piquant, and affecting fiction set in the past, often with a scientific bent, as in her most recent story collection, Natural History (2022). In her first book of essays, which are as keen and beautifully crafted as her stories, she parses the challenges involved in writing literary historical fiction, especially the need to balance facts gleaned through research with the artistic imperative to depict what it felt like to live in an earlier time. A writer must absorb as much information as possible until "it's become a kind of memory," and then transmute that essence into fiction. Barrett considers the works of Tolstoy, Willa Cather, and Toni Morrison, and cites Virginia Woolf's The Years as transformative. She shares her story about a forgotten nineteenth-century naturalist, then reveals what's factual and what's invented. Just as particles of atmospheric dust scatter light and form clouds, she observes, historical material "is the nucleus around which language and feelings gather." With candid accounts of false starts and revision marathons, Barrett's felicitous chronicle will intrigue and enlighten passionate readers and writers.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
National Book Award winner Barrett (Natural History) expounds on her approach to historical fiction in this edifying meditation. She argues that while getting the facts right is important, writers' paramount concern should be capturing the intangible feeling of what it was like to live through a particular era, and she recounts how she read early 20th-century medical texts about tuberculosis and accounts of Americans who fought in WWI while developing her novel, The Air We Breathe. Reading widely can lead to unexpected sources of inspiration, Barrett contends, discussing how she discovered the 19th-century British physicist Oliver Lodge, around whom she built the short story "The Ether of Space," while researching a different piece. She warns against "dutiful adherence" to the historical record, positing that fiction writers should focus less on bringing historical figures to life and more on rendering them "ambiguous" and "mysterious" enough to serve as vehicles to explore broader themes. Barrett's reflections on her process provide glimpses of a master at work, and she supports her observations with sharp analysis of how other authors tackle historical fiction ("Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell succeeds so well in part because in addition to being absolutely, obdurately himself, he also illuminates the processes of power"). It's a bracing inquiry into the purpose of fiction and its relationship with truth. (Feb.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
"Following the hints of glitter among the heap of rubble." Barrett's bouquet of essays reflects on her craft as a writer of historical fiction. Each essay seeks to get behind the subjects of her work, while at the same time raising questions about how blurry the line may be between fact and fiction in literary narrative. It has been said that anything, once turned into a story, becomes a kind of fiction, and Barrett explores how telling people's stories turns them into novelistic characters. She surveys a range of subjects whose stories she has tried to tell: 19th-century Arctic explorers, the Victorian polymath Oliver Lodge, early-20th-century Brooklyn, the history of disease and cure, the ruminations of Virginia Woolf, World War I heroism, and specialists in everything from insects to anatomy to narwhals. This is a highly personal book, rich with lived anecdotes about what it meant to come to books as a child, what it meant to try to write after the terror attacks of 9/11, and what it means, now, to be a professional author. Barrett quotes the scholar Saidiya Hartman, who herself has experimented with fictionalized historical narratives: "How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know?" That is the key question of this book. Written in a conversational style, the collection works well on the page; it would likely be even better as an audiobook, with the listener hearing and feeling the writer's embodied life in words. Evocative essays on the challenges of writing and reading historical fiction, memoir, and literary biography. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
