Andrea Barrett’s new collection of short stories opens, “The cover is faded olive, not flashy; not the first thing you’d pull from a bookshelf.” Maybe Barrett and the book’s designer had a bit of fun, since the cover of her collection, Natural History, features a fine selection of greens, browns and purples against a slightly faded olive background.

It’s a handsome cover, although that wasn’t what made me read the book last fall. I’m a fan of Andrea Barrett’s writing, which is mostly historical and tends to centre on scientists, as most books don’t. In March, when it was one of fifteen books named to the longlist for the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, I read it again–the Shields Prize being a $150,000 award that will go to an English-language book published in Canada or the U.S. and written by a female or non-binary writer.

I love re-reading books. The first time, you read a book headlong, or I do, following the story and characters while giving yourself over to the momentum. What happens? The next time you can slow down and start drawing connections, as if you’re meeting someone for a second date (as I vaguely remember) and asking yourself how they fit into the wider world, and what you really think of them.

Natural History is an impressive collection, very finely written, and it made me think not just about what Barrett is doing, but what the best short stories set out to do. When I taught creative writing at the former Ryerson University, now TMU, we would take stories apart to discuss technique. I would often ask students to read one of Margaret Atwood’s short stories, partly because I admire Atwood’s stories and partly because they’re easy to teach, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. 

People have come to realize, with the U.S. Christian nationalists trying to manifest Gilead, that Atwood is a species of prophet, acutely observant and brilliantly analytic. She picks up keenly on present-day trends that she extrapolates into an exploration of both what’s going on in the world—what’s really going on—and therefore what the future might hold. She has an extremely sharp eye, and daunting though the assignment is, every writer has to try to see the world as clearly as she does.

I liked to teach Atwood’s story, “The Age of Lead” from Wilderness Tips. Modern scientists discover that members of the 19^th century Franklin Expedition to Canada’s far north died of lead poisoning. This much is fact, and it’s also true that expedition members had no idea that the lead solder in their tin cans of food would kill them. Atwood juxtaposes this story line with fictional late 20^th century characters who are dying of new diseases in our environmentally poisoned world. (Wilderness Tips was published in 1991.) In class, I would challenge students to work out Atwood’s thematic concerns and ask how she uses them to focus her story. We would explore the way she creates forward momentum by eliminating digressions from the theme, and study how she returns to her central concerns at the end to dovetail the storylines together. 

Sometimes students asked if we could take apart a short story by Alice Munro, and my answer was something along the lines of: You’ve got a year? Munro is hard to teach and even harder to imitate, since her stories centre on things that are never said but that everybody knows, like bathroom noises in a house with thin walls, to use one of her early tropes. Munro is obsessed by secrets—one of my favorites among her books is called Open Secrets—and especially by lies. Many of Munro’s characters are extravagant liars. Or at least, they’re us caught in one of the lies we prefer not to admit we’ve told; lies we tell all the time, and that shape our worlds as profoundly as the truth. 

Reading a Munro short story for the second or twenty-second time, I often wonder if she starts by writing a more linear Atwoodian story, where this happens because of that and X results. If she does, even in her head, the next step must be to cut it radically. One thing that’s always missing from a Munro story is an explicit statement of her characters’ motivations. Instead we witness their lies and contrarian impulses, and even though Munro never explains what makes her characters take a giant leap–as so many do–these leaps always seem both mysterious and perfectly comprehensible. There’s a sentence in the story “Privilege” from her collection Who Do You Think You Are?  “Life was altogether a series of surprising developments as far as she could learn.” So are Munro’s stories.

That’s a long introduction to Andrea Barrett’s Natural History. But I bring it up partly because Barrett’s first story, “Wonders of the Shore,” turns on a brilliantly-executed Munrovian lie. 

I’ll spoil it a little. A schoolteacher in the late 19^th century named Henrietta Atkins goes to the seashore one summer with her friend, Daphne Bannister, who writes books about natural history. Henrietta lives in a small town in upstate New York where she is being courted by a local farmer. Her mother expects Henrietta to marry the farmer, who would provide her with a comfortable home and a well-defined role in society. But Henrietta is drawn to Daphne’s life as an unmarried and self-supporting writer, even though she knows Daphne works terribly hard, publishing books under more than one name. This summer, she also learns that Daphne parties with potential patrons in a craven and unappetizing manner. There are ways in which Henrietta dislikes her friend, and in turn, Daphne can treat Henrietta badly.

One day, at the hotel, Henrietta receives an entirely pleasant and ordinary letter from her suitor, the farmer. But she reacts extravagantly, tearing it up, lying, claiming to witnesses that he has dumped her: a lie that changes her life. We gradually piece together her unexpected motive, which only comes clear in time. It’s a wonderful story, and unique in the collection. If I can make the distinction, the rest of the stories unfold in a more logical, explained, Atwoodian manner. Yet since the rest of the characters in the book, down to the present day, are somehow related or connected to Henrietta, her lie stands behind everything else that happens.

When I first picked up the book, one of the things that attracted me was these interconnections between her characters, and not just in Natural History. Barrett has been writing about many of the same characters and locations throughout her career. A character named Rose Marburg from Barrett’s 1996 story collection, Ship Fever, appears as well in her 2002 collection, Servants of the Map, and shows up on the first pages of Natural History. 

Rose is a descendant of one of Henrietta’s nieces. Now, in a story I particularly liked from Natural History called “The Accident,” Daphne meets another of Henrietta’s nieces in the 1920s. Caroline is an aviator, barnstorming in air shows across America, deeply scarred by the accident she tells Daphne about, yet also released by her trauma. In another long story—they’re all quite long—we meet Henrietta as a child, and then as a high school teacher. Caroline appears in that one, too. My own recent short story collection, The Necessary Havoc of Love, also loosely follows the same characters, many of whom first lived together on a communal farm in the 1970s, or are closely related to people who did. In bringing back characters like Rose Marburg in several of her books, Barrett goes a step beyond this, and her world building is something I’ve been thinking about for my own work.

Yet if I have one criticism of Barrett’s new book, it’s that there’s a sameness to these stories, not just in subject but in tone. In the end I came to feel this stems from the intricate connections among them—so intricate, there’s even a family tree at the back of the book. There has to be. Alice Munro’s work is set in small towns as well, in her case near Lake Huron, which isn’t that far from the towns Barrett writes about in upstate New York.

Yet Munro’s stories are never claustrophobic, each of them individual and surprising. I think the difference comes because much of Munro’s work is so subversive in its casual overturning of social mores, its lies and abrupt leavings. In Natural History, Barrett only does this once, in her first excellent story. After that, the sameness gradually overpowers. 

Barrett is a deeply intelligent writer and her research is formidable. Many readers enjoy immersing themselves in her world, and I can see why. I also closed this book, both on first and second readings, thinking that I wouldn’t try to weave my own work together as fully as she does. I’m doing a little of it. A young boy I wrote about as a very secondary character in my novel Drink the Sky, set in Brazil, seems to want to be an adult in a new novel I’ve just started. I’m interested in tracing how the trauma he faced in Brazil affects him in adulthood. Yet I doubt I’ll do much of this going forward. Creating entirely new characters requires far more effort than returning to ones you’ve written about before, who become old friends. Barrett’s new collection teaches me that creating new characters and settings may require more work, but it also allows a book to breathe. 

Natural History didn’t make the Shields Prize shortlist. But there were fifteen good books on the initial longlist, all of them worth reading. That’s the beauty of issuing the longer lists: a large group of books is introduced loudly to readers, who will all have their favourites. Natural History will be a favourite with some, and for many excellent reasons. Among Barrett’s works, I prefer her novel The Voyage of the Narwhal. Individual taste. But life would be pretty boring if there was only one style of book to read, and we couldn’t argue about the ones we like best. 

Lesley Krueger is the author of the short story collections Hard Travel and The Necessary Havoc of Love.