Volume 49, Number 13 · August 15, 2002
For Goodness' Sake
By Joyce Carol Oates
Servants of the Map
by Andrea Barrett
Norton, 270 pp., $24.95
Servants of the Map is an inspired title for Andrea Barrett's painstakingly written book, a gathering of five thematically interwoven stories and a novella linked by theme and characters to her preceding Ship Fever (1996), itself a gathering of interwoven stories and a novella. Both collections deftly explore 'the love of science and the science of love—and the struggle to reconcile the two,' as Barrett has said, and both contain vividly imagined historic situations. (In the novella 'Ship Fever,' the typhus epidemic and Canadian quarantine of 1847, following in the wake of the Irish potato famine; in 'The Cure,' the novella that concludes Servants of the Map and continues the adventures of an Irish survivor of 'Ship Fever,' the establishment of tuberculosis 'rest-cure homes' in the Adirondack Mountains in the early years of the twentieth century.)
Review, 3450 words
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