In her novels Natural History, Archangel and The Air We Breathe, Andrea Barrett established her presence as a writer of literary historical fiction. Her main characters are scientists and medical types at the turn of the 20th century, those who see the world in a grain of sand and those who want to explore the unchartered polar ice caps, those loyal to their curiosity and theories (even when those theories are faulty). In addition to the novels, she has produced collections of interconnected stories in which the protagonist of one will wander through the background of another, providing the attentive reader with a frisson of pleasure. Although her work has been rewarded by the marketplace – a National Book Award, a MacArthur grant, a Pulitzer nomination – one could be forgiven for regarding her focus as niched. But if this is your niche, snuggle in.
It is gratifying, then, that she so deftly takes one behind the scenes in Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction: “Again and again … I set off energetically toward something I thought I could see, only to crash back down empty-handed. A kinder word for this process, by which I’ve made both my work and my life, is revision. Disaster, mess, slightly less mess; small improvement, two steps back, a swerve and another small improvement.”
In this collection of seven essays, Barrett explains how she does what she does, as well as how other writers, particularly Virginia Woolf, approached their own work. She lays out how to navigate “The Sea of Information” (the title of one essay) when conducting research for historical fiction, how to avoid disappearing down research rabbit holes (though it’s best not to regard any research as useless) and how to grapple with the dozens of questions that arise when pursuing a character through the challenges of their times.
“Is it possible,” Barrett asks, “to write subtle, allusive fiction set in the past in which history is not merely backdrop, and yet the characters retain the full complexity of their inner lives and aren’t forced to act simply as witnesses to key events? And in which plots predetermined by the incidents of history don’t overwhelm considerations of language and form?”
Well, yes, it is possible as Barrett has demonstrated in her own work, but here she is talking about another master of the form – Virginia Woolf. In an essay titled “The Years and The Years,” Barrett explains, “Her basic strategy looks like this: put everything in, then take most of it out. Make structure and rhythm do the work of superfluous information.” Barrett presents bits of Woolf’s diaries, her years of research (12 volumes of reading notes!), until, as Barrett puts it, “facts dissolved fully into fiction: what Woolf learned is so deeply integrated into her imagination that it emerges in her characters with the same offhand immediacy as lived experience.”
A quip attributed to Mark Twain says “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” But for a writer of historical fiction, truth can get in the way by obscuring the opportunity for imagination. Barrett takes us through two of her own projects to explain. She spent years trying to find a way into a “big biographical novel about British physicist Oliver Lodge that, in the end,” she chose not to write. Barrett is clearly enamored of Lodge, a “madly productive and long-lived man of science” who was, more importantly, quite wrong in his theory of luminiferous ether. She opens the essay “Dust and Light” with a highly detailed account of his life, pausing only to anticipate the reader’s question of her avidity (“why am I following Lodge through his life like this?” and finally “now I really will stop, it’s already too much, the twists and turns of his life go on and on”).
But she doesn’t stop. Neither did Lodge. He kept pursuing his education until at a prominent conference he delivered a lecture on dust – “the floating matter of the air” – which advanced his reputation and inspired him to advise himself in his diary “look more directly to the substance of things … look less at shadows.”
Barrett then takes us through the labyrinth of her contemplation of historical fiction, considering works which have achieved what she wanted to do with Lodge – compelling fictional biographies created by Hilary Mantel, John Edgar Wideman, Julia Alvarez – and considers what makes good historical fiction and what to do when too much history interferes.
Density of fact can prevent the light from getting in. A writer of historical fiction needs a fissure into which she can insert her imagination, make a story her own and a character a real person. She concludes: “Dust scatters light … gathering and making visible what is otherwise unseen – which is also the major function of the material used by fiction writers.”
From a novel she could not write, she pivots to her story, “His Biography,” about another obscure scientist named Packard, an evolutionist and champion of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. She presents the story in its entirety, and then takes us through her process, her research and her writing of a story about Packard’s contemporaries. Her interest, energy and discipline, like that of her characters, are unflagging — perhaps especially when she and they are in a mad pursuit down a blind alley:
“All my life I’ve thought that with hard and diligent work, a person could master almost anything. I had little sense … of how essential chaos is, how great a role serendipity, intuition, and timing play. How much waste is essential.”
When this book functions as a craft book, it leads by example. Although she begins by declaring that her book is not about herself but rather about craft and how facts function in fiction, she concludes by admitting that her readers have, by spending time with her work, learned something about her: “You have a sense of my sensibility … what I notice, what I pay attention to.”
True. By devoting her practice to the creation of ardent, dogged explorers, Barrett has told us something about herself – that she is one of them. Self-deprecating about her own talent, sometimes presenting her dedication as foolhardiness, Barrett demonstrates that committing to one’s practice – be it mapmaking, the study of an obscure cave invertebrate, or creating fiction focused on a certain type in a certain era – is a fine way to spend one’s life. That we learn from our mistakes is a bromide we like to shrug off, perhaps because the darker truth behind it, that our missteps are our best teachers, is something we have to learn afresh with each effort. The only way out is through.
[Published by W. W.Norton on February 25, 2025, 178 pages, 26.99 hardcover]