Natural history-Henrietta Atkins
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Title: Natural History
Author: Henrietta Atkins
N° pages: 192 pages
Price: $26.95
About the author:
Meet, if you would, Miss Henrietta Atkins, teacher of evolutionary science to generations of local schoolchildren in Hammondsport, N.Y., perhaps the most enduring character Andrea Barrett has ever created. Proudly unmarried, looking tall when not next to other people, her sleeves pushed back to reveal her strong arms, always smelling of fern, Henrietta radiates outdoorsy capability. “All around Crooked Lake, people were aware of Henrietta,” states Ms. Barrett. While there are no discoveries associated with her name, no books that document her views, Henrietta’s influence lingers in the minds of those she taught and even those who came after them.
Review:
Henrietta is the unacknowledged heroine of “Natural History,” Ms. Barrett’s 10th book, an imaginative miracle woven of complexly connected stories. Fans of Ms. Barrett’s fiction will remember Henrietta from “The Island” (2010), as a disenchanted participant in a summer school taught by the anti-evolutionist Louis Agassiz. To her would-be mentor’s dismay, she discovers Darwin and is hooked for life: “One sentence locked into the next and the next. . . . A gigantic crowd of examples alternately crushed her and then swept her wonderfully, relentlessly along.” Henrietta takes that epiphany back with her to Hammondsport, a miniature version of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg or John O’Hara’s Gibbsville—with the important difference that Henrietta’s hometown really exists. But that’s precisely the dizzying effect Ms. Barrett’s writing has on her readers, catapulting them into a zone where things real and imagined, history and literature, Charles Darwin and Henrietta Atkins may freely mingle.
In the volume’s finely wrought opening story (“Wonders of the Shore”), Henrietta and her friend Daphne visit the poet Celia Thaxter, very much a historical figure, on Maine’s Appledore Island. Ms. Barrett treats us to a description of the floral-themed interior of Thaxter’s house, written as if the author had been a guest herself: “poppies arranged by color and tea roses in matching bowls; sweet peas, wild cucumber, hop and morning-glory vines spilling from suspended shells and baskets; larkspurs and lilies in tall vases and stalks of timothy and other grasses . . . with a few red poppies interspersed.” Unlike Daphne, Henrietta soon turns away from the hothouse atmosphere of Thaxter’s salon, preferring instead to peruse, windows open to the ocean air, Darwin’s book on insectivorous plants.
Plants, to Darwin as well as Henrietta, aren’t ornaments but fellow creatures demanding our sustained attention. In Henrietta’s quick summary, each of Darwin’s experiments, in which he tickled the leaves of his plants and fed them meat, entailed “a question posed correctly, to which an answer might be found.” That same phrase reappears in Ms. Barrett’s final story, the source of the book’s title. Here, Rose Marburg, familiar from Ms. Barrett’s award-winning collection “Ship Fever” (1996), finds herself attending a science camp, the way her great-great aunt Henrietta did, too, over a century before. Dismissing her own past scientific ambitions, Rose recommits herself to the more interesting experiment that is her current life, teaching junior college, taking the dog for walks, and— the reader is happy to learn— writing Henrietta’s biography
“Natural History” marks a productive tightening of Ms. Barrett’s focus, with Henrietta appearing in all but one of the stories, whether she’s working to salvage the reputation of the crippled Civil War veteran Izzy Deverell (“The Regimental History”), introducing spellbound children to the metamorphosis of insects (“Henrietta and Her Moths”) or helping her daredevil niece Caroline recover from injuries caused by an airplane (“The Accident”). In the sardonically titled “Open House,” Henrietta fails to convince the Durands, local winemakers, that their son Charlie’s future lies in paleontology, not viticulture.
In Ms. Barrett’s world, ruled by unflappable women, nothing much happens and yet everything does. And there’s plenty of heartache and pain, too. The reader knows that the history of Izzy’s regiment likely won’t get written, or that Charlie’s paleontological aspirations are doomed. In perhaps the starkest example, Caroline, misunderstanding Henrietta’s instructions, takes a pair of scissors to her baby sister Elaine, hoping to speed up the process by which this annoying caterpillar might be transformed into an acceptable human (rescued by Henrietta, Elaine survives with just a scratch on her back).
Immersing oneself in “Natural History” is an experience both bracing and magical. Characters, places and ideas merge in a dance that casts the helpful family tree provided at the end of the volume in about the same light as the famous diagram included in Dar- win’s “On the Origin of Species” —as an incomplete abstraction imposed on the flux of life. Ms. Barrett’s prose is by turns clinical, as when Henrietta expounds the structure of a butterfly’s wing, poetic (“the planets gleamed in the dark sky like luminescent fish”) and quietly sensual, and often all of that at the same time: When Henrietta, years later, learns about the death of her former lover Sebby, a painter she met on Appledore, she easily conjures “his touch still warming her skin.” As Ms. Barrett’s sentences wrap themselves around her characters’ thoughts and sensibilities, even a simple observation like Henrietta’s “It was lovely, actually, to have a free day” seems beautiful.
In “Natural History,” the blurring of distinctions, of past and present, reality and fiction, is enhanced by a narrative consciousness that doesn’t hover over the characters so much as live in between them, switching at will from one perspective to the next, allowing us to see the world through Henrietta’s eyes as well as look at her the way others do. Here Darwin, master of large collections of facts, meets Chekhov, subtle manager of multiple viewpoints. For what matters most is not that one finds the answers but that, like Henrietta Atkins, one keeps asking the right questions. Or, in the plain, powerful insight offered in the book’s final sentence: One must “do the experiment.”
Ratings:
Amazon – /
Audible – /
Good Reads – 4,0
https://mbenvblog.wordpress.com/2022/09/03/814/