NATURAL HISTORY

Henrietta Atkins and one Marburg sister return from Ship Fever (1996), Barrett’s National Book Award winner, in interlinked stories ranging across half a century.

Henrietta occupies center stage in the first three stories. “Wonders of the Shore” takes her to an island off the New Hampshire coast for an 1885 summer vacation with her friend Daphne. Barrett delicately contrasts Henrietta’s life as a high school biology teacher in Crooked Lake, her central New York hometown, with Daphne’s profitable career as a science writer and pseudonymous cookbook author; she plumbs the women’s complex relationship and provides a surprise ending that reveals Henrietta making an unexpected decision about herself and her future. In “The Regimental History,” she is a bright, inquisitive 10-year-old fascinated by the letters of a Union soldier, later learning of the soldier’s sad decline from his nephew, who’s one of her students. In fewer than 50 pages, Barrett considers the cost of war, the duplicity of leaders, and the nurturing bond between a young person and an inspired teacher. “Henrietta and Her Moths” also ranges through time to trace Henrietta’s efforts to help her sister, Hester, through pregnancy and motherhood and to provide a vivid glimpse of Henrietta’s ability to convey the excitement of scientific observation to her charges, including Caroline, her tempestuous niece. Caroline has become an aviator in “The Accident,” which captures both the joy of flight and the cruelty of class privilege with Barrett’s characteristic subtlety and cleareyed compassion. In “Open House,” another of Henrietta’s students faces a conflict that underpins the entire collection: The bonds that tie people to family and community are challenged by the ambition to find a place in the larger world. That theme becomes explicit in the title story, which finds Rose Marburg in 2018 reflecting on her choice to abandon scientific work that led others to a Nobel Prize. As always, Barrett depicts the natural world and the human heart with wonder, tenderness, and deep understanding.

More superb work from an American master.